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The photo offers proof that I know a celebrity from the world of entertainment that has fun and enjoys parties and nightlife when I see one. Carabao anyone?
Photoshelter's Allen Murabayashi says I am probably already on my path to failure regarding this blog because nobody wants to read it, and no one is. He says there are two reasons for a blog:
1. A person has something so incredibly interesting and viral that people can’t stay away.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO).Allen says no one will ever care about this blog because I will never say something amazingly noteworthy. Moreover, I should write in a journal rather than post thoughts online. Ok, that's fair enough. Internet rankings and an examination of the stats back up that assessment. Although this blog's Alexa ranking has moved up 5,200,000 places in the past month or so, it's still mired in 4,806,417th place according to Technorati.com.
Furthermore, of the people who do visit, only 10% ever return. Clearly, very few people are interested in reading more of my brand of BS once they see it so Allen Murabayashi is right. Let's look at four topics people are staying away from.
1. Child laborer Chantal Srey Mao, 16, who was killed at Stung Meanchey Landfill in Phnom Penh, Cambodia a few months ago.
2. The rape and disembowelment of Lao Hmong women and children currently taking place in conjunction with an ethnic cleansing program being jointly conducted by the Lao and Vietnamese Armies in northern Laos.
3. A Cambodian woman stricken with breast cancer who faces death as a result of being denied access to a foreign funded NGO by the Cambodian government.
4. Sixty million people living in Southeast Asia's Mekong River Basin, some of whom will become victims of ecological damage while enduring human suffering due to hydroelectric dam projects.
Admittedly, these subjects are "incredibly uninteresting" to readers of this blog and that's backed by the fact that no comments were left regarding them. Allen is an intelligent man and he knows what he's talking about.
Ok. Ok. I get it! So what are more important subjects to YOU? Celebrities? Entertainment? Fashion? Film? Food? Football? Fun? Parties and Nightlife? Shopping? TV? Video? All of those words are among Technorati.com's "Top 100 Tags" relating to blogs.
The problem folks is those tags apply to people living inside the bubble of Western prosperity and some people just don't care about that bubble too much. It's not that I don't take notice of these pop culture topics, it's just that I want to diversify.
What does the tag "food" mean to those who have enough to eat vs. the 40% of the population in Cambodia that is malnourished? There is food for eating of course, but also food for thought.
How about "TV" and "video"? In a country where TV news is censored by the government but eighty percent of the people lack the electricity to turn a television on if they had one, that tag takes on new meaning.
In Galeano's words, "While society would draw and quarter us, disembowel us, cut us up into little pieces in order to fake an understanding of the human condition but in fact subdue us, what we really crave is to put the pieces together. We are what we do to change ourselves. We are daily involved in the struggle to reconcile the contradictions that bedevil us."
Therefore, Mr. Murabayashi, I'm going to continue to march along my path towards personal failure because the world's contradictions certainly bedevil me and "we are what we do to change ourselves", not our little blogs nobody is reading anyway.
John Brown Photojournalist On LIGHTSTALKERS
1 comment:
Keep doing what you're doing, John!
SEO loves you either way.
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