The Grand Narrative’s First Birthday

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Apologies for not writing this post on the day, but then the combination of viruses on my laptop and the week-long flu I had didn’t exactly lend themselves to injecting some bonhomie into what I was writing. Also, I confess, blogging-wise I’d been feeling a bit wistful anticipating the blog’s first birthday, much like I find one’s own actual birthday arriving is usually a bit of a let-down here because of the bizarre Korean habit of adding a year to your age on January the first, regardless of how late in the year the actual date is.

Enough of that though. Lots to talk about, and probably much too honestly for my own good. I’ll start with the blog’s statistics, as much of what I plan to do with it in the next year (or largely not do as it turns out) ultimately revolves around those. Sorry if the following sounds like so much navel-gazing on my part, and/or only of interest to other bloggers, but then there won’t be another post like it for another year!

Statistics

Here they are for the last three months:

And please allow me some vanity by presenting this graph from when I started using StatCounter also:

Some blogging milestones difficult to make out in those are my reaching 1000 visitors for the first time on the 13th May, and having over 1000 visitors a day every since June the 8th. I was tempted to extend the stats one day further, because then I reached a new record of 1269 visitors, but that would be cheating.

Okay, stats both should and shouldn’t be important to bloggers that don’t have advertisements on their sites. They should because:

- Boy, does looking at that second graph feel good. Seriously though, short of the much more important but intangible networking, employment and other goals I aimed for by setting up the blog, there’s little else, other than numbers of links, comments and RSS feed subscribers, to tell you that what you’re writing is actually being read and discussed.

- Many may disagree, but I do think that the day a blogger stops caring about his or her stats is the day the quality of their blog begins deteriorating. For sure, there are natural ceilings to the numbers of people that will read blogs about Korea, especially pretentious ones with long posts like mine, and after, say, five years of blogging then I may well not give a rat’s ass about stats either. But in the meantime, there are a host of small and trivial-sounding but ultimately important changes you can make to a blog to make both first-time and long-term readers enjoy it and want to come back, and a good place to start learning about those is this blog about, well, blogging. The content is still very important of course, but it’s little good if people can’t find your blog easily, or get so put off by, say, a disorganized layout once they’re there that they can’t be bothered reading it.

- The more popular your blog is, the more likely people are to find it. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve written some complete crap on my blog, and on many occasions have seriously considered deleting the entire thing and starting with a fresh slate because of it. But now that this gratuitous shot of Miss Korea is up for example, then the thousands of people who’ve googled it and arrive at this blog via that route mean that my blog gets pushed up higher in the results of the more “serious” searches that I want, even though those googling, say, Neo-Confucianism Korea Women, may be less than impressed by those pictures lurking elsewhere in the blog. Because of the former I’d be foolish to remove them, but because of the latter I’d be stupid to highlight them too, so I’m in a bind over whether to remove the “Hot Korean Girls” category or not.

Similarly, if I went self-hosting – as I promised to do once I reached 1000 visitors a day – then I’d be back at square one in the searches, and as that one negative more than outweighs the minor positives then I’ve decided against it. Sorry.

( Image by PeterForret )

But that last point about Miss Korea leads me to why I also shouldn’t care about my stats:

- The more visitors I get, the more Statcounter tells me that the vast majority looked for less than five seconds. In my friend’s experience, if he’s looking for pictures of women via google than it takes, hell, a good ten seconds or so to determine that a site like this one has very few pictures of women really, and that they’re wearing entirely too many clothes. But still, five or ten seconds or whatever, on a good day 80% of my visitors are doing anything but reading it. That has nothing to do with how good or bad my blog is – it seems to be inherent to popular blogs, especially ones that mention women in virtually any capacity – but still, it places the statistics in some perspective.

- The number of links to your blog are more important then. Unfortunately Technorati, the best-known site which measures those, is very unreliable, regularly counting splogs that link here as genuine but missing whole swathes of links from genuine blogs entirely. But presumably it’s missing out links to other blogs too, so while the absolute figures it provides are useless the relative figures if provides are okay. Which means that Brian’s excellent blog, for instance, gets far fewer hits than mine but is much better known and talked about (just!).  As he himself is, given his articles in various Korean magazines and newspapers, and is setting an example I plan to follow.

( Image by DJ Bass )

Practicalities

Time, Comments

Even just three months ago, I usually spent about 1-2 hours a day on the blog, mostly basking in the glory of my stats reluctantly rejecting topics to blog about, reading books and journal articles on those I did choose, writing and editing, and finally finding cool photos on Flickr. These days, it’s usually 3-4, primarily because I’m doing all that and responding to comments, emails, and unfortunately a large and increasing number of trolls too.

I hope I’ll never become like some big name Korea bloggers that virtually ignore all comments and emails, but I’d be lying if I said that I sometimes feel weary dealing with all of them these days. Until recently I generally worked on posts and research in the mornings, went to work at about lunchtime, and then dealt with comments when I arrived home at 10:30, but these days if I gave all of them the replies that they deserved then I’d be up till 2am most nights. Sometimes I do do that, and look it the next morning, but I’m finding that most of the time I make half-hearted starts but soon give up and just hit the sack; I am, after all, pretty exhausted after screaming at kids. That’s fine and sensible, but unfortunately I haven’t been compensating by writing replies in the morning instead, so I have a huge backlog now.

As I type this I realize that that’s because I’m still stuck in the mindset of a newbie blogger, finding it difficult to spend as much or even more time replying to comments as researching and writing posts, especially if I’m in an inspirational buzz after drinking my morning coffee(s). But if I don’t I’ll end up just like those bloggers I complain about, so my sincere apologies to all of you that I’ve seemingly ignored, and as soon as I finish this post I’ll get onto dealing with that backlog, and always try to respond to comments within 24 hours from now on. If that sometimes means that I can’t post when I planned, so be it.

( Image by monkeyc.net )

Writing Style

Despite what I’ve said about doing little things to a blog to make people interested almost despite the content, strangely it’s only been relatively recently that it’s occurred to me that some people do actually read what I write, and that I need to take that into account. My natural blog-writing style is probably this, which I was in hysterics writing and still laugh at rereading now, but which unfortunately isn’t well suited to the kinds of topics I write about now.

As those topics become more cerebral, I’ve (again) only just realized that I need to make a big change in the way in the way I write them. Previously I’d typed everything into the tiny WordPress version 2.5 visual editor window, editing and previewing the post sometime up to 30 times as I go along for sure, but still, nothing like my MA essays, sometimes on much the same subjects and which more and more of my blog posts are beginning to resemble (ish), albeit without footnotes.

For those, I would generally do all my research first, make very detailed plans, begin to type the essay on MS Word where everything’s easy to see all at once, make connections and realize things as I did so which necessitated going back and change the plans completely, do half of it and print all that out, edit it till like you wouldn’t believe, sometime later work on the second half, combine them somehow…and only much later would I have an actual essay. It worked: I generally got A’s and B’s as a student. But I’ve only just started doing that for the blog, meaning that there’s a lot of posts there that look pretty, are full of academic words, and that I personally learned a great deal in the process of writing, but…man…I look back at them and cringe. I really should have resisted posting them straight after I finished writing them.

That includes some posts which people said they liked, and I hate to unintentionally sound patronizing to them for doing so. Let me avoid that by putting it this way: I never used to pay much attention to old posts at all, but then I started to get more and more comments on them months later, and some of the negative ones could have been avoided simply by providing clearer explanations and a better structure and so forth. Also, as I’ll explain, I’ve recently offered to write articles for some expat magazines, but once my proposals have been accepted and I’ve gone back to the old posts of mine that inspired them, thinking that all that’s required is changing a few lines here and there and removing the links…I’ve realized that they’re completely unacceptable. Partially because they’re very different media, partially because they lack things which my generally intelligent and knowledge readers already know and/or that I’ve already discussed…but mostly, because like I said, I’ve only just started to write with readers in mind.

Hmmm, maybe that doesn’t deal with me sounding patronizing. Oh hell…I don’t know. Not everything I write has been bad, and you’re allowed to like it! But I do personally think that I need to do a lot of work on the clarity, length, and interest and relevance to readers of my posts; my ultimate plan is, after all, to write for money, and while I’m slowly but steadily getting closer to that goal it’s still some way off yet.

Future Plans

Ironically probably the most concise part of this post, but if anything writing it has helped me to prioritize and narrow them down all the more:

Statistics:

Despite their ultimate irrelevance like I said, 80% of 2000 visitors reading the blog everyday obviously helps to achieve all my other blogging goals much better than 80% of 1000 visitors a day does. And although there’ll be a natural ceiling for this blog like I said, it’s hard to know where that ceiling is exactly because so few Korea bloggers make their stats public. For that reason I’ve started using SiteMeter as of the 18th of June so that bloggers inclined to do so can compare themselves against me, and eventually it’s averages will come in line with the reality. Meanwhile, here are the stats of The Marmot’s Hole and DramaBeans, the only two Korea blogs I know of that also do.

Not having much more than those to go on, then I’ll aim for 2500 daily visitors by this time next year. No, really, I think it’s quite possible and realistic. I’d be very surprised if at least 1500-2000 of the Marmot’s Hole’s visitors, for instance, didn’t arrive there solely because Robert has five years of material for search engines to latch onto (which newer blogs obviously lack). That isn’t a comment on the quality of his blog, it’s just a statement of fact. Still, that doesn’t mean that my planned jump won’t be quite a challenge, especially with my second daughter arriving in October.

Of course, what I’d really like to know is how many visitors the Scribblings of the Metropolitician gets and aim for that instead. After all, it would be very patronizing to readers to pretend that I’m not trying to emulate it in many ways.

Subjects:

I’m very happy to hear what readers would more and/or less of, otherwise I’ll probably keep to much the same subjects as I already am. With one important exception: I’m also going to start looking at all things related to Koreans in Australia and New Zealand, and those countries’ larger relations to Korea too.

When all is said and done, I’ll probably be returning to New Zealand in the next five years or six years or so for my daughters’ sakes, and once I’m there my most realistic chance of a semi-interesting and well-paying job, involving frequent travel to Korea, would be working for a company heavily involved in trading with Korea. And there’s no better medium than a blog to both become an expert in that field and become known for being one too.

( Source. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Korean Actress Ha Ji-won (하지원), who studied English in New Zealand for a year. One of those lucky ladies has had the good fortune to see me half-naked from less than a metre away, and not only that but also when I was seriously buff, pumped, and had delicious sweat running down my pecs and abs too )

That may not sound interesting to the 99% of you that are not from Australia or New Zealand, but I’ll always relate them to wider issues of comparative immigration policies, Pacific trade, and identity issues of Korean emigrants and so forth, so other countries will get a lot of mention too. In a nutshell, if you like the stuff on the blog already, then you’ll like those posts too.

James Turnbull™

So, other than those minor changes really, the purpose of this blog will still primarily be for me to make like-minded friends, to network, to show to future employers how *cough* clever and knowledgeable I am and so ultimately get that fabled non-ESL job. Sorry if that sounds a little selfish, but I did warn you about the honesty. And I don’t think it makes me somehow less noble than bloggers who write just for fun.

And actually this blog will continue even after I do get that job, for I find it fun too. A few years ago, I picked up Stephen King’s autobiography, and in it he writes that unless you’re already writing as often as possible for the sheer pleasure of it, albeit with your dreams of becoming a famous author in the back of your mind, then you’ll simply never be a writer. I read that in 2006, and realised right than and there that my supposed dream of becoming a writer – one which virtually all BA graduates share – would only ever be precisely that, as I never actually did put pen to paper. But now, in 2008?

My job is pointless, repetitive, and an insult to my intelligence, but it does give me long hours to myself sitting at my desk. I don’t even have classes on many days, but nevertheless still have to be seen at my desk for most of 2:30 to 9:30. Yes, that pretty much does say it all about the mentality of the place, most expats with F2 visas would chafe at the restrictions for additional employment, and so I would quit were I not making a respectable amount of money for 32 year-old English teacher in Korea (albeit increasingly not a 32 year-old back home). But I do so I won’t, and in many ways the hours are a blessing really. And because all the constant meetings and announcements and so forth don’t apply to me, then usually I just arrive, plug in the laptop, ignore everything and everyone else and get to work on this blog. Frequently I’ll get so in the zone that I’ll suddenly realize with a start that four hours have passed and that I quickly need to prepare my classes, let alone eat dinner (or even lunch).

I love and am amazed how I can lose myself in it so. In all seriousness, it gives me a sense on an almost palpable and spiritual level that this is what I ought to be doing with my life…suddenly having to stop writing and being a clown for a few hours feels so jarring and like such an affront, much like the way you feel when you’re watching a beautiful and moving scene in a movie and then suddenly advertisements start screaming in your face.

With that in mind, from now on I’ll be spending much more time working towards not only writing for magazines, academic journals, and presenting papers at conferences but getting paid for doing so too; this blog will just be one block in that dream I am building as it were. As will becoming fluent in Korean too, as I’ve spent too much time on this blog rather than studying that (obviously much more useful), and with my next daughter arriving in nearly three months than I’m running out of time.

And on that note I’m looking forward to making a fresh start, especially as I type this on a Monday morning. A whole new week, pregnant with possibilities…sigh. Life is good.

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