Tuesday 3 April 2007

Understanding the Internet, Part 1

Thanks to the offices of my good friend Thomas Hamburger Jnr, my blog is now well and truly 'up and running'.

I can't pretend for a minute to be an expert on the internet, or even the world wide web. For me, it's a fathomless ocean of storm-tossed ideas, tempting you hither and thither to go down avenues where the outcome is at best unknown, and at worst positively sleazy.

My youngest son, Jasper, seems to be much more clued up when it comes to navigating himself across the vast sea that the internet has become. He's been 'monitoring the stats' as he likes to put it - nosing around on my hard disk to generate a report on who's been visiting my blog since it was launched.

He seemed to quite enjoy the fact that someone apparently came to read my blog after searching on something called Google Blogsearch for the directory enquiry service, 192.com. My recent posting about the Independent newspaper article regarding Swinging comes in at No 3 when anyone searches for 192.com on Google Blogsearch.

It was all a bit of a puzzle to me, until Thomas Hamburger explained that, in posting that piece for me, he'd kindly highlighted the Light of Bengal restaurant by linking it to an online page at 192.com.'

Mystery solved.

However, from what Jasper tells me, the number of readers of this blog has been woefully low. No matter. The voice of Bill Blunt is not easily stilled: and neither is his quill!

It's a brave man who accuses Bill Blunt of being a quitter. This blog's staying! (And, following Jasper's sound advice, I intend to get more explicit when it comes to labelling my posts!)

2 comments:

Crofty said...

I couldn't help but notice that in your last post about lawns you had included the keyword 'sex'. This is a lesson about the shallowness of the potential internet readership that I too have learnt: including sex as a key word will guarantee an increased - but probably disappointed - readership of that post.

Bill Blunt said...

Alas, I am to blame for the labelling of Bill's posts, Crofty.

I took the liberty of employing a bit of journalistic shorthand by using 'sex' instead of 'making love'. We always found the Beagle's sales rose dramatically whenever we used the 'S' word on the front page of our 'inserts'.

Little Freddy Marple was probably the worst for this. Many were the disappointed women after one of his inserts, I can tell you.