I have been known to get a tad carried away, so when my sister told me about the PicketFience.com web site and the competition – I kinda went for it! I did not know what the web site was about, who else was on it, why they were blogging and I did not even check them out. Well that is always rule number one in a competition –suss out THE COMPETITION.
So anyway, I used this “competition” to put together screen shots of my stats, comments etc. I figured that I would write an article about this, you know how to get children interested in blogging.
As the old saying goes, if a trees falls in a empty forest does it really fall, well now it’s been updated: if a tweet is tweeted to no followers is it really tweeted and if a blog is published to no audience then has it been blogged at all……NO, no, no, no, no, no and one more time for the people in the cheap seats NO!!
There is no point in this God Given Green world to bother blogging if no one is going to read it. That’s where I am coming from, so when I do have my own class and thus a class blog I want the children to know about the post topic as well what goes on behind the posts – the stats, what articles are popular, how to get an increased audience, how to promote their blog, how to design it so it is more appealing thus increasing their exposure. Ya see it’s all about the numbers!
OK back to the point, I had gotten enough data and was happy with how this article was shaping up. So I went to http://picketfenceblogs.com/category/teaching?similar=3946 and saw that I was number 16, “enough now” I thought. Then I looked at number 1, this guy had 2,000 votes. I thought it was strange as he must be (A) really popular or (B) this competition has been going on for a really long time. Something was not right about this…anyway I went to his site and was just blown away. This was his bio said “Named a top 25 Autism blog by babble.com and Autism Speaks. I’m a father to 3 Autistic boys and husband to a chronically ill wife dealing with Fibromyalgia. I blog about our story in hopes of raising Autism Awareness. I’m VERY open and VERY honest”.
His site was slick, well maintained, a nice profile picture and an excellent cause about the true story of his life and family. I went back to the picketfence.com and realised it was not a competition but a directory which was rating the blogs by popularity. There I was – in competition to be number one with this fabulous man. He was educating the world about autism whereas I was collecting data for an article I was working on trying to prove how important the stats are…..
Well, stats are important but so is the content. I realise that I have to relax that cold IFSC’er side of me where everything ties back. If you want to support him then grab the below code for his blog button and of course vote for him and donate if you can. His web site is http://lostandtired.com/
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If any of you have ever worked in accounting you will know that you do not need to have the skill of attention to detail as the system or excel sheet will not tie back so you know you have gone wrong. But unfortunately there is no tie back in blogging only reality and this is “The Reality of Blogging.”
Michelle Moloney King 