So three times in recent memory, plasticbag.org has experienced fairly substantial increases in traffic. The first time was when a conflagration of warbloggers decided to take me to task about something I’d written about the power of the inbound link. This post was widely misinterpreted – even to the extent of being mentioned at the Revenge of the Blog Panel in the States by Glenn Reynolds as an example of “people not clear on the concept” (although the context of the transcript is a little unclear as to what concept in particular he’s referring to). But even though it was misinterpreted, it still sent a good few people to my virtual door – even if they were mostly brandishing fiery torches and threatening to burn down my castle.
Shortly after this came the incident at Blogger when (thanks to Phil (and indirectly to the current Pyra crew) I found myself in the unenviable position of being able to alarm and terrify two-thirds of blogdom with my scare stories about random hax0rs with world-destroying uber-weapons.
And in the last couple of days, my piece on Apple and the Pirate Everyman (which was widely given rousing yeah and so whats by friends of mine before I put it online) has been picked up by Macintouch.com, Doc Searls and CafĂ au Lait (among others). And again, as a result – a short-term surge in traffic.
It’s always nice to get more traffic to your site – it’s nice to be read. Makes you feel like you’re not completely talking into the ether. But at the same time it’s also weirdly paralysing. When something on my site gets picked up by a large new audience that haven’t had any experience of me before, I tend to feel a bit overwhelmed and confused by it all. I can’t think of anything to say when there are (new) people watching. I get stage-fright – glued to the spot by expectant eyes. Or maybe it’s more complex than that. Maybe I feel embarrassed when the politically active come to read a political post and find instead a poem about iBooks. Maybe I feel still more embarrassed when the Mac Gods and Open Source Pioneers end up wandering through my site on the days when I want to write about the huge amount of crisps I have in my kitchen cupboards.
Sometimes I think it would be much easier to write a site – you know – about something…