Recent Observations

Like most people that write on line, I'm always trying to figure out how to do better. Get more views, get a higher rating, communicate more effectively, etc.

Since the Hubpages makeover, I can study the statistics more easily. Some of my hubs seem to get more hits from foreign countries. Maybe they have a greater interest in the esoteric. And most of my hubs are either esoteric or about the arts.

In the last few days, I've gotten a lot more comments on Hubs that haven't come up on my email in a long time. Perhaps that means my Hubs are showing up better on search engines since Hubs revamped things. Or it could mean that writing on places like gather.com and linking those people over here is paying off. It always helps to figure out what you are doing right so you can repeat it, but sometimes I just can't quite figure out what I am doing right.

I used to have a group of fans on Hubs that read a lot of my new stuff, and they seem to have wandered away. Partly I think it's because now there are so many hubs to read. Maybe I went from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big pond as hubpages grows and grows. I'm happy to meet new readers of course. I just don't want to lose all my regular readers in the process.

Partly it's my fault because I haven't done a good job of reading and commenting on the hubs of others. Why should they read mine and comment if I'm not reading theirs and commenting? I'll see if I can do a better job of that.

I also think I don't make better rankings because I write on obscure subjects. I just don't know how to write about cellphones, ipods, celebrities and those other 'highly searched subjects'. And I want to keep my Hubs my own work. In other words, if I actually interviewed Madonna, I might write a hub on her. But I'm not going to write a hub on Madonna and just regurgitate stuff from YouTubes or Myspace or news clips that really belong to some other writer/videographer just to improve my hub scores. I want to create my own legacy, not just borrow someone else's.

I know it is harder to come up with original Hubs. But it's like being in school. Just because you can plagiarize an article out of an encyclopedia, doesn't mean you should.

So if Johnny Depp calls me for lunch and I get to write a story on him, you'll be the first to know.