Art, you are right of course. The Congo Memoirs are a case in point . Nobody was reading them in the beginning. Then I started threatening people and bludgeoning them and stuff and they ended up being more read.

Susannah and others: This is number two for me you know!

Stephanie: Actually, Julia never cried or fussed much, but she also never slept much, now that I recall.

Ah, inexperience! Charming!

Oh my FSM, that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day!

Don’t be too quick to cater to the audience. I have found that, like some niche TV shows, it takes time for an audience to find you and for an understanding and appreciation to grow. Star Trek was canceled after its first year.

Also you have to ask what motivates a posting. If it is something you think about a lot then it probably deserves to be on your blog even if only a few people read it. A blog is a celebration of personality and ideas. Truth and the value of ideas can’t be measured by the numbers who read them.

Just because few people read a post doesn’t mean that might not change in the future. I sometimes make posts to forums that I pretty well know will not be widely read. Sometimes things just need to be said or put on the record. Often months, or even years later, I get an e-mail about a post or I see my idea, often the exact words, show up. While the view is often that forum input and blogs are ephemeral the exact opposite may be true. With sites like the Way-Back Machine and search engines crawling sites from twenty years ago it is pretty common to have stuff you thought would disappear into the void reemerge. If you don’t have an audience now, you might at some time in the future. Nobody knows where it will end up, who might read it, and what effect it might have on them.

IMO one of the biggest reason the majority of the mainstream media is so shallow and vapid is because they cater to the audience. Instead of putting out a quality product and letting the audience find them and allowing a community to form they want acclaim and a strong response now. So they sink into sensationalism and stroking the audience by confirming their bias. FOX news is a good example. Useless as a news source they stroke and cater to a particular narrow point of view and to thrill junkies who mistake empty and useless diatribe for content.

Congo Memoirs?? 🙂