Good Angel, Bad Angel

On My Right Shoulder, the good angel, in the voice of Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, who writes about the fungible and often illusory rewards of blogging - things like traffic numbers and money and recognition in the square press - which in the end don't add up to much compared to the things that really matter:

But I’ll do so knowing that those numbers don’t really matter. What I’ve gained from blogging - friendship, community, education - can’t be quantified. The best things in the blogosphere are the connections you make, the relationships you form, and the posts that amuse, inform, and surprise - and those are things that can’t be measured by Sitemeter or Technorati.

On My Left Shoulder, the bad angel. I wondered like a moron for weeks why my Sitemeter traffic was so much lower than on my hit logs. It hit me the other day; because I only had the Sitemeter code on the main page, not all the "archive" pages with the individual posts to which other blogs (to say nothing of Google) link.

I say "had".

I put in counters on all the pages, now - and my traffic is looking much healthier.

Joe's right, of course; the greatest rewards of blogging are the new social circle, my new friends both personal and virtual, the avenue it re-opened into talk radio, the outlet of constant writing, and the chicks. Oh, the chicks.

But right now, both the angels are high-fiving me.

Posted by Mitch at July 13, 2005 04:52 AM | TrackBack