Do Not Feed The Bear
Well, how far have we come, people? When the Pops' Bucket Editorial Staff and I got together yesterday for our bi-annual Company Picnic and Winter Carnival (bad planning... don't ask) we got to reminiscing about how different this blog has turned out to be from the way it was originally conceived.

It's like the first season of Happy Days where it was single camera, all on film and Richie had an older brother. But then from season two on, it was all Fonzie all the time, three cameras video taping on a sound stage and poor Chuck Cunningham became a Trivial Pursuit question.

The answer is that we have become somewhat ratings obsessed. Anything to draw eyeballs. That's why I included the shameless Happy Days reference in the above paragraph. I know what the kids are watching these days and it was an audacious ploy to seem hip.

(And unrelated, I like to switch between first person plural and first person singular just to keep you on your toes. You're welcome for that little surge of pronoun-induced adrenaline.)

Anyway, the purpose has changed and for that I blame Sitemeter. Being the type who maintains a culturally-irrelevant personal blog, it is obvious--and, to my everlasting credit, explicit--that I am, shall we say, invested to some extent in the subject of Me. Add something like Sitemeter to the mix and now I have one more way to think about myself, study myself and understand myself; my thoughts as a fetishized commodity. It has pretty charts too.

The danger of course is that it is just possible for one to develop an interest in what Sitemeter (or any other web counter) has to say that is perhaps a bit overly... intense. The tissue-paper-thin wall between self-adulation and self-criticism is all too easily introduced to the great destructive Sneeze of Raw Numbers when you see daily (hourly, minute-ly) interest in the things one has to say churning and undulating like last night's vegetable curry.

Objectively of course the quality of what I write has very little to do with day-to-day numbers, but God, it just looks so official over there. The problem is that the Sitemeter people just do too good a job. It's exactly the right kind of beer to feed the bear. And as the old saying goes, if you give beer to a bear...

You know, I'm just not sure how to finish that one.

Really, much more gratifying (quality over quantity here, which I've always found to be a dubious distinction) is getting the occasional public acknowledgement of your own awesomeness. My new BFF Sunny, for example, said something nice about me for which I am grateful. Of course she was also talking about 9 other people including herself (a true blogger, that one), but I'll thank you to not click the link above and let me mischaracterize her post as All In Praise Of Pops.

But I do want to assure everyone that now that I'm a growing internet (shout out to Rita) sensation, I won't forget you, the little people. Especially since I haven't figured out a way to make any money on this pile of crap yet.

I guess in the end I should say that this blog will continue to evolve. I find the whole thing fascinating, really. Instant publication of anything, from the trivial to the sublime, all over the world in a manner of seconds. But no matter how much this changes, even if I develop a powerful fixation on chinchilla farming and this thing becomes Pops' Bucket of Chinchilla Breeding Minutiae, there will always, always be one single unifying point of reference.

Me.

Sorry.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0 (My First Perfect Score!)


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 12:11 PM