For new readers: There is a method to my madness in blogging. If I don’t blog for months its probably because I an up to my elbows in something or other or because I deem silence necessary. Shortly after the recent election I stopped blogging so much because I didn’t want to alienate new school board members and hoped for a fresh start. That wasn’t the only reason though. I was beginning to prepare for another once in a lifetime trip in this case to Israel. I did have blogging about the trip in the back of my mind but in late December I attempted to fix my blog and the repair went very sour so that I could no longer blog. I didn’t get around to finding someone to fix it for me until about a month after I returned from Israel. I didn’t mind at first because I was still getting to know my new board colleagues and silence and my inability to blog seemed mutually beneficial.
Ironically, through all this time silent January was they busiest time for stats in my blog. I stop writing new stuff and my readers come out in droves. Well that tapered off so that February and March were pretty quiet. I mention this because I left my blog untouched for the past three days. Yesterday the blog stats were impressive 698 visitors. The day before it had been well over 500 with nothing new.
I’d left Marci Stromgren’s “Just the Facts” interview as the last thing on the page because I liked the idea of people getting a gander of me in talking mode and not just writing mode. By explaining the show but only linking to Marci’s youtube page I could count the number of watchers as my blog would not have registered clicks onto the hour long interview. After four days up only 61 people had watched it or watched some portion of it. That’s just a fraction of the 1000 plus visitors to my blog over those days.
Its not as though my visitors were left without new stuff to rifle through on the blog. I’ve been pretty prolific. In the first nine days of May so far 250 visitors have spent over 30 minutes on my blog. Considering the most of my readers likely hail from Duluth and that I have almost exclusively chattered about the Duluth Schools that’s pretty encouraging.
There is little doubt that my most read item of the month was the op ed published in the Trib the day of our May second meeting revisiting the potential sale of Central to the DPSA. According to MNNews.com Its readership on Sundays is 63,762 while other days of the week its 40,636. That’s rather a lot more attention and when I went out to buy steaks for Mother’s Day the butcher told me he really liked what I wrote. I hope he wasn’t the only one.
As for my interview with Marci I got one nice compliment from my Buddy who put away the swords to email me that:
“I liked the rapport between the two of you, and I liked that both of you seemed to be disposed to let each other talk.”
Conversation is a two-way street.
