Below you might read a blog I wrote specifically in my beginnings with Medium (at least two years ago). Since then I have noticed that my Blogger statistics that gave me a number (I never quite believed it) that peaked at 480,000 have dwindled to under 200,000. The Blogger stats told me about “so called page views”. They did and do not have the Medium sophistication that measures the time people remain in a blog. Of late and I have to admit my total stupidity in not knowing how to tag. My repeated cries for help to the folks at Medium returned with the Medium instruction on tagging. But I finally figured it all out so I am going back to all my Medium blogs (most are drop ins from my personal Blogger blog) and I am inserting those tags. I have since then noticed a higher incidence of readership in my my Medium stats. But the “friends” (many of them)at facebook have yet to figure out that my photographs are linked either to my blog or my Medium repeat.
I am still personally appalled the fact that most of the popular Medium posts begin with “How to… or why… or they are simply lists. While I am a bilingual writer (Spanish and English) I have yet to figure out how to submit or to ever be asked to submit. I go to the tags and I am startled to not find American Literature or poets like Emily Dickinson (I have my own Emily Dickinson Medium mag) or any reference to film noir and the like.
I do not take it all that seriously so I don’t fret.
Are Blogs Relevant?
I have written a blog since January 2006, 20009 of them at http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/ I have been using both facebook and Twitter as platforms to launch my daily blogs as links. Folks these days have eschewed RSS feeds and unless I post my blog link in facebook they think I am not writing. Many who spot my blog links to which I always accompany with a photograph might indicate that they like my photograph (I have been a magazine photographer in Vancouver, British Columbia since 1976) and yet I have noted that very few note or understand that the link to something written is there. They look at the picture and move on.
This does not affect me one way or another. Early one I avoided the kooks by not allowing comments to my blogs. A blog, in the true sense of the word is a bitácora (the Spanish word for a ship’s log). I write my blog to please myself and to put my life in some sort of order.That my oldest daughter (44) says to me, “Papi, now I don’t have to ask you questions of your life and of your life with us. It’s all there,” that is an extra. On the other hand I have a friend (since we were in our early 20s, I am now 71, he lives in the US, I live in Canada) who refuses to speak to me on the phone or on Skype because he can read about me every day. That is no good.
I look forward to see if this Medium will be indeed a place where one can write and be read and where I will no longer see “nice pics”.
Originally published at medium.com on November 10, 2013.
