Decoding the Blogosphere

I set up my blog in January 2012, with not much knowledge of the Blogosphere, other than I knew I wanted to start my own blog. Now, five months later, many elements of how everything works is still somewhat a great mystery to me.

Designing my page was the easy part; Blogger walks you through the entire process. Once it was set up, however, I stalled. More than a month passed before I wrote and published my first post. It felt like I would be baring my person to the world, and I am by nature a private being.

But once I got started there was no stopping. So many things I wanted to say, to share, to seek feedback on from others. I haven’t missed very many days writing a post, and sometimes it’s been difficult to find the time, but I did it anyway

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I visit several other blogs daily. Some are beautiful, some inspiring, others educational/informative. I am only now beginning to notice details about how other blogs look. Some have print that’s too light, others have a dark background that makes them difficult to read. Some blogs have “too much” information; too many details; more than I want to know (but that’s just me, I’m sure). Some blogs are “too busy” and it makes me dizzy trying to take it all in. But hey, that’s the great thing about blogs: the owner is free to make it whatever he or she wants and if someone doesn’t like it, too bad, you just mark it off your reading list.

One thing I may want to venture into (I’m not yet convinced) is installing widgets such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, RSS Feeds and Google+, but I’m totally in the dark on how to go about it. Sometimes I read the instructions and they sound like Greek to me. So, slowly, I will crawl my way through and hope for enlightenment along the way.

One thing that’s amazing to me about my blog is the number of daily readers and their locations. My stats tell me that the U.S. readers outnumber all others, with Canada, the United Kingdom and India closely tying for second place.  A few countries I understand, because I have blogging friends there – Finland, Australia and Spain, for instance. But Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Russia, Indonesia, Philippines, Ghana, Pakistan? How do all you lovely readers find this, or any other blog, for that matter? I would love it if you could share that information with me.

Also, my stats rank the number of hits each post receives. I am somewhat startled to see that the Positive Thinking post has had, and continues daily, to be read more than any other post. As of today,there have been 2,477 page views, compared to, on average, 50 page views of other posts.

Most blogs I follow do not have ads; a few do. How to readers feel about having to see ads on blogs? In some cases they don’t bother me. I might consider allowing ads if I could control what ads would appear; I wouldn’t mind those related to cooking, gardening, books, fashion and similar subjects that interest me. But I think it’s out of your hands once you open the floodgate. Are any of you out there familiar with exactly how that works? What is your opinion about ads on blogs?

These are just a few musing I am having tonight as I think about blogging and what it has meant to me. I very much enjoy hearing from each of you who leave me a comment. In this short time I have come to have blogging friends  I feel I know, even though we are miles apart.

Any feedback you can provide on the topics I’ve discussed above would be most appreciated. And thank you again for visiting my blog.

Sanda