I was working on several of my many drafts today and I realized that a significant portion of my time is spent thinking about my audience… and by audience, I don’t mean the nice people who end up reading my blog, but the search engines that get them here… many of which are owned by Google. I face the dual challenge, with each post, to create content that is interesting to read and which will produce hits after it is snarfed up by the giant snazzy box that is Google.
If you’ve read my posts so far, you’ll notice that they generally are either concerning some hot-button issue or they are a review. The hot-button issues are somewhat obvious trolls, but I do believe I have something to contribute to each. The reviews are deliberately not of the triple‑A games I play (which have many reviews) but of the smaller independent games I play (which hopefully means my post is among a smaller list of peers).
The rants require the most effort. I feel I need to give some history (since my publication hasn’t covered them before), give some links (good for Google, good for reading) and then give my opinion part (the meat of the post, if you like). Links in particular provide authority to a post, but they also provide better pagerank scores. I would have linked Google there, but the page Google finds at Google is a corporate back-slap and doesn’t explain anything… so I linked in Wikipedia… which, as always, has a fine page.
But is this creatively selling out? At the beginning, I admitted that I was going after getting Google to pay me money. The whole online publishing industry is pretty much brimming with capitalism and self-interest. Even if I wasn’t interested in making money, there is no such think as unbiased journalism. In fact, there shouldn’t be. Like it or not opinions are like rectums: everyone’s gone one. Pretending you don’t have an opinion is equivalent to pretending you don’t have a rectum. It’s silly, for starters.
So I have a rectum. I also have pagerank. Lastly, eventually, I’ll have readers… each of whom will also have rectums (I suppose that’s not always true, and if you are in the rectum challenged crowd, I truly feel sorry for your loss…). But the majority of those readers will only find me if I have a sufficiently high pagerank. That’s certainly rationalization, but it’s one I can live with. The content is still all me…
Pingback: Voldemort is not Creepy - Random Scribblings ...Random Scribblings …