Linkblogging for 14/07/09
I wanted, today, to finally do my European Election aftermath post that was delayed by lack of net access, inspired by this month’s Liberator (now with 100% more unfair attacks on Alix Mortimer! Very odd, that bit…) but my head’s battered today, so I’m going to give you some links and watch a Doctor Who DVD instead.
Alex at Love And Liberty has done his own Doctor Who essential DVD list, partly in response to mine, and has also been reposting a few articles he wrote for the now defunct site Outpost Gallifrey. Probably the one you need to read if you haven’t is How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal, his most well-known piece, but there’s a few good new posts up there.
Pillock has also been on a roll recently, with posts on Alien Legion And Depression and Wednesday Comics, neither of which I’ve felt coherent enough to comment on, but both of which I think are among his best stuff.
Eddie Campbell tells you how to get into the movie business. (Incidentally, those of you who don’t read his blog should – it has the same level of insight that makes his comics so great).
Charlotte Gore wants to Ban The Internet!
Zom has a great post on Batman And Robin – another of many that I’ve wanted to comment on recently but haven’t had the brain to say anything sensible about except “good stuff”.
And Costigan Quist has written a lot of good stuff this week, so just go and read through his last dozen or so entries.
I met Freema Agyeman on Saturday. She was judging a dog show my dogs had entered. We had a bit of a chat after, until she recognised someone and turned her back on me and sped off. I wasn’t offended, though. Not much, anyway.
Song Cycle is my fourth favourite Van Dyke Parks album.
Thanks. Andrew! I was kind of worried those ones just kind of degenerated into incoherent crap, after a while…
Hmm, most people coming on from here seem to prefer Alien Legion to Wednesday Comics…at least, to read me blathering about them…
Quite a few people, actually, Andrew! I think you may have become quite popular without knowing it.
I suepect they’re just clicking the first link then reading both…
As far as I can tell I’m not at all popular – I get a pretty steady average couple of hundred visitors a day to the site itself (not sure how many of them are the same people coming every day), and maybe another fifty or sixty a day syndicated views. By contrast a site like, say, Liberal Democrat Voice (a groupblog about the Lib Dems I read) gets a thousand unique visitors a day.
What *is* nice though is that a lot of people whose writing I like, including yourself, occasionally let me know that they’re reading and enjoying at least some of what I write. I’d much rather have a few people I respect reading this than a lot of people I don’t…
Oh, heck, Andrew: you’re on the Firefox start-up list, you know. I read every damn thing you write.
Ha! Blogger Compliment Wars!
I always read your site. Every day.
Okay, I don’t read everything you write about Dr Who, but then I only have a passing interest in that subject
The thing is, you might not get millions of hits, but the hits you get might be in some sense high quality: decent bloggers, smart readers, creators, etc…
Oh absolutely – and you’re one of those whose writing I like and who I respect mentioned above. The dozen or so most frequent commenters on here are, give or take, the dozen or so people whose opinion I’m most interested in anyway – if the only people reading this were the handful of regular commenters, I’d still consider this worth doing.
Obviously I’d *like* to have a million readers a day – if nothing else so I could give up work and live off advertising revenue – but I’m amazed that *anyone* reads what I write – let alone people I actually respect and like – so I’m fine with things as they are…
You know, I used to have big passels o’ hits, on occasion…got linked from WFA once and had zillions, but they all only stayed for about six seconds apiece. Then I got linked from Pretty Fakes and had a couple people sit on the site for an hour, going from post to post! So I know what kind of traffic I like — the high numbers, they’re not satisying because they don’t represent anybody engaging with what’s been written, much less engaging in the way I’ve become accustomed to. We’re very lucky to be able to write stuff in an environment where you get your own kind of readership, a readership that suits you, pretty much without having to do anything to find them. Quality traffic, yeah…I’ve got Jonathan Burns occasionally writing three thousand words of PKD/GKC crossover fan-fic in my comments, it’s bloody thrilling. So at this point I think I really would turn up my nose at a million visitors a day — what am I, Time magazine? No thankee.
Actually I’m quite pleased with my most popular posts — or, I was a bit more pleased when the top one was, by a good margin, the Kirby Zodiac that RAB and I cooked up. Always pleasant to consider that Jack Kirby is a lot more well-known and appreciated than we insular comics folks think he is! I got people looking at that one from all over the world, it was just great. Unfortunately it got bumped by the “art-comix crowd” thing I wrote, that got linked from The Beat, Journalista!, and CR. It could still catch up, though!
And my third top post is still the Time-Travel Meme, a wonderful thing because so many people submitted such genuinely impressive work on it. I’m still really, really gratified by that one.
Say wha’? Who, where, when, why? I can’t afford Liberator to find out, alas.
Can’t find my copy, but they say you were completely unfair about the expenses thing (“unlike the other four editors”) and about half the thing (about a column or so of the page, as I recall) is about an aside you made about watching The Wire, and they were saying things like “We just have to hope that nothing else disturbs Ms Mortimer while she is watching her crime dramas”, etc.
Really quite petty stuff, and rather out-of-place I thought. Nothing for you to worry about, but I harumphed a bit…
Ew. That will have weirded out quite a lot of their readership, I would think (not least the section that watches the Wire).