blogging: 10,000 strong and growing?

Uh, wow. Back in June, I was all happy when my blog reached 10,000 visits. Much of that was friends and new repeat visitors, and it wasn’t counting that many unique hits. Sometime in the past few weeks, I passed 10,000 unique visits, and I had a nice inner Woo-Hoo! for that. Still, last week blew me away. Nearly 1,150 visits, over ½ of those from new people. For some other blogs, 1,150 hits a day is low, but that’s huge for me. And I know that it all has to do with my posting the We’re the dancers video, at least the massive surge of hits does. I also got a mention on DC Blogs and in the Express Blog Log, but really the internet can’t get enough of JT in Easy Spirit pumps.

It’s ok, it’s cool, most of you are just “here for the food” or the video in this case and I’m fine with that. But to borrow a concept from “Single Ladies,” if you liked it then you shoulda said hi. It’s sort of a combination of popularity and neglect. Are visits enough? If you’re running a site with ads, then they are because it’s all about impressions and click-thrus, etc. But for a lot of bloggers, I imagine that they’d like to know what at least some people think of what they write. I don’t really consider myself a writer any more than I consider myself a chef, but I admit that it’s odd to put my thoughts out there and know people are reading them and clearly coming back to read more. I’m under no illusions that people were just trying to find a spot on the internet to watch–and probably download–that video where it hadn’t been taken down. The staggering number of hits from a d’Nash fan forum thread and a Fotolog member’s page were a bit weird, since I have no idea what’s being said by the commenters on those pages.

A bad habit I’m trying to break out of is visiting other blogs with content that I really enjoy, but not saying so. A little more than “Cool post!” since that looks like spam, but as I’m seeing so far almost 500 people hitting that page, it would be nice to hear from more than just my buddies. So I’ll try to do more than just visiting other peoples’ stuff, I’ll make comments and link to it when I think that people really need to see it: not just the hilarious stories about tampon mishaps.

One main problem that I’m running into is too many blogs to read and keep up with. Mme Meow, lacochran and Gilahi also mentioned this at the meet up. Between the things I read to keep me sane, the stuff I read to make me laugh and the blogs from wonderfully cool and hip people online… I’m overwhelmed! That “Mark All As Read” button in Google Reader is so tempting more often than not. And some sites like io9, as well as some people like Prince of Petworth just post so much stuff, there’s no way I can set aside enough time to read it all. I used to read and more lately find myself skimming, which is a habit I’m sure isn’t unique to me.

Maybe if I started running ads on the site, I could afford to hire a PA that would be able to read all the stuff I’m interested in on the internet, collect the specific links of most interest and create a feed of just those… and take in my dry cleaning. Even if all of the content I want is good–which it isn’t, I still wouldn’t have time to keep up with all of it. Even though the very nature of the internet makes it like a web-DVR, it’s still hard to track it. Anyone else feel that sense of information overload online?