Sunday 28 February 2010

Questions: why blog?

A reader has asked:


I am intrigued that you write blogs, not being a blogger myself.  Do you know how many people read your blogs?  Is it disappointing if no one comments?  How do people find you, or know if they want to read your blogs?  Why do you call yours watertowerproject?



Thank you very much for your questions, it's good to reflect sometimes:

If I had the time I could make more effort and make my personal blog more like traditional blogs and try to attract traffic etc. but I don't really want to do that. I could know how many people read my blog if I wanted to as Google provide tools for that but I haven't installed it as I don't care how many people read the water tower project.

I state my blog's purpose clearly so people can move on if they land on it randomly. Successful blogs are usually on a specific subject so the user can rely on the blog as a resource and regularly return to it or subscribe to it; such as blogs about modern design or trains or water towers but for me I find this technolgy is a useful way of notebooking my ideas and sharing them. Apart from putting up random essays, I can also email things I find on the web directly to the blog and then link to the blog in correspondence with people rather than send large attachments. Having a blog enables me to do this from any computer with web access.

I don't expect people to find me via the blog but it is nice when they do. I used to put my email address but I got inundated with spam or timewasters. Now if people comment, I get an email alert. If people care enough about what I'm saying and don't want to comment, they can always find my email and phone number. My contacts are all over the web.This blog has lead to me making many local contacts, such as yourself, with people concerned about the same issues I am who don't neccessarily comment on the blog.

I write some other blogs. The busiest is www.bwtas.blogspot.com which is the reason my blog is called the water tower project as the project was getting bwtas off the  ground. I later transferred most of the content. I couldn't think of a memorable name for my random collection of thoughts so I stuck with the name, as besides, water towers are storage made useful by elevation, which in some ways is what my blog is.