Geelong by night

Yes. There are now 99 blogs on my website. On the 20th of January this year someone living in Canada where it was a Saturday and probably pretty cold, read 49 of them. Well … ‘read’, looked at, clicked the web address, spent a moment, ‘visited’. Some sets of statistics would allow me to know how much time this person had spent per click. However despite the welter of information available to me, that is missing. Nonetheless I suspect that because he or she went carefully through various series (apparently) it might have been more than a moment. 

Could that be because of their addictive quality? Mmmm. Yeah … probably. That’s my story. But even though in October last year someone from Malaysia seems to have either read one blog 62 times on the same day or be suffering from untameable chorea of the index finger, a hard-eyed analysis of the available data suggests that this has happened just the once.

But yes, there are 99 blogs which I have launched off into the ether. Each time there are some fairly predictable results, and just as often there are results which are well beyond my capacity to predict. It’s no news to say there’s a lot happening out there in the digital universe that is incomprehensible to the common man or woman.

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The purpose of preparing these blogs is not to deliver careless slights designed to undercut Geelong’s inexorable rise as an international powerhouse.

They began as long-ish pieces of writing about travels. Originally I circulated these by email in Word files accompanied by other files of photos. Sue Mann, Ms Digital Technology herself, pointed out that you, one, could do all this much more efficiently by using a blog shell and suggested WordPress, which is where you are right now. 

WordPress has its virtues. Unless you write to surfeit (which I do) it’s free, it’s pretty simple to use and incorporation of photos has improved recently. It also has its failings. The capacity to format is very limited. (See my ‘Contents‘ page for a good example of how things go wrong.) Just the one font for example; just the one text block. It huffs and puffs if you try to stuff too much into the one piece, and sometimes expires if you’re open too long which produces the familiar infuriating losses. 

But, and this is important, all my stuff is in here now. It’s not just that I’m old and failing or lazy. Moving to another format would be like shifting house. What happens, I wonder, if it goes down? Unless I take steps — steps in the fog, I don’t know what they are — I lose the lot I guess. And that would disappoint me.

Sphinx Hotel, Thompson Rd, Geelong West (maybe Rippleside, but round there)

To return, my purposes: The blogs did begin as long-ish pieces of writing about travels. So they’re aides memoire, and they work very well like that. I am my most serious, consistent and appreciative reader. I am sometimes given pause by the way they ‘become’ the trip or the experience. If I go back to read my journals or look at all the photos I took I can find another story. But I don’t mind that. The finished articles are already the result of after-the-fact sitting down and thinking about what happened, going back over journal entries, collecting more information to try to make sense of puzzles and fill in gaps, and filching other relevant material and images from the internet. 

And then I publish. Or as we say these days, ‘share’. To ask why is to flip the lid off a well-populated can of worms. Why do we do publish? I suppose I want to show you what I’ve made/ to tell you what I’ve been doing or thinking about. Something like that. 

Even though there are bigger issues to be resolved here — how come everything on the internet is ‘free’? — it’s not to make money. Several unknown people have contacted me about ‘monetizing’ the site, but even if I wanted to there are so many reasons why that wouldn’t work. The most promising proposition would have yielded about $130 a year and I would have had to make some serious changes to what I wrote and wrote about, how often, how long and how it was set out. It might generate a vast new audience and produce $135 a year. Or I might as though by magic become Taylor Swift. But, hey, nice of them to think of me.

Do I want a vast new audience? Not really. In a resolutely old-fashioned way, I send notification by email to about 100 people I know, friends, relatives, contacts from the road. Maybe 40 of them read it and, although I hope not, it is quite possible that some find it annoying. But there’s always the bin. Bottom left. Easy.

Also in a resolutely old-fashioned way, most of them are not ‘followers’. Twenty people have chosen to be automatically notified by email when there is a new post; 15 others use WordPress and get a notification of anything new in their newsfeed. (There. Lost half my audience already with this dizzy sophistication.) As well as a couple of friends I know, these 15 include ‘Surviving Victim 2015’, ‘Angels of Passion’ and ‘The Riparian Times’. I have the idea that WordPress might be bunging random oddities into this list for the purposes of encouragement.

Brief pause for entertainment: Excitement at Geelong’s Eastern Beach.

I don’t think I’m looking for approval although that, of course, is most welcome. In this primordial version of digital interaction, my readers rarely ‘like’ what they’ve read. But some, a few, are diligent commenters. Among this crew Joan Holt, Andy Webster and Jane Cav are the standouts. Some blogs draw more comment than others and I hazard for very differing reasons. The first blog about the death of Girin Flat might have reminded readers of their own experiences of the ’70s; The Knee might have garnered a sympathy vote; The Miracle pulled in the footy crowd; and The Nakasendo Trail (see below) is usually people asking me questions.

The most generous ‘comment’ has been a long email from Michel Faber who went to the trouble of providing a very thoughtful and positive response to ‘Dancing with Mr Su’ as well as a boxful of suggestions for copy edits. This, from the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, one the the 21st century’s really good books, made several of my days.

That’s what people do. They send me emails — emails not texts or tweets or likes or ‘comments’ — and we correspond. It’s the old days round here and one clear purpose is to keep in touch. 

But in terms of purpose, I’d say, beyond anything, it is just what I do and have been doing since I could, which is now a long time ago.

More fun at Eastern Beach

What happens?

When I send out my notice very generally speaking 80-120 people visit the new blog that day, 45-60 the next day. It tails off after that. Generally speaking.

Supporting something the makers of soaps have long known, the blog about Mitzi and Simon’s wedding got 480 views in the 12 hours after it was posted. (How does that happen? Who are these people who want to look at the wedding of someone they’ve never met and never will? How do they find out?) The post about the Boat People was also comparatively popular, very quickly. One reason might have been that it was shorter than usual. I note that since my first blog was published on October 12, 2012 — ‘London’, the beginning of a trip to Europe — the number of blogs I write in a year has diminished but their average length has doubled. Could be a mistake. (TLDR. Look it up. It’s modern.) However, 180 people, about 175 more than I anticipated, have had a look at Dancing with Mr Su which is about 35,000 words. It was a pleasant surprise to find that there was a market even of that size for this precious set of 20-year old memories.

Someone looks at something every day, every single day! (it’s busy traffic out there), on average 18 times. A heap of this traffic, the considerable majority, is people looking at my blog on The Nakasendo Trail, the reason being that it has been hooked up to Oku Japan’s Facebook page. It has received 9997, 10,014, 10,017 hits since I wrote it in September 2013. This shows several things but primarily the power of Facebook (from which I abstain). 

I have gone back to read this blog lots of times a bit puzzled and vaguely wishing it was a bit less feeble. Maybe I could have tarted it up a bit more, filled out more of the detail.  But I also think these people could have been reading about the crisis of Catholicism as visible in the decorative effects of St Peter’s, or the distinctive religious sunglare of the epistle to the Ephesians. Far more interesting. But the excellent Adam Downham from Oku (who was good enough to meet up with us on Shikoku) has written: ‘Our team often point your blog out to guests curious as to what the trail is like; there’s no better honest description since the newspaper articles, as grateful as we are to have them, tend to speak in hyperbole.’

And I would never ever ever indulge in hyperbole. Never. Not even if the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode in here right now. Six.

The men of Geelong … and the women

 

 

 

The greatest number of hits in any one day (1744) came after a Croatian site, ‘Dubrovackidnevnik‘ (‘Dubrovnik Diary’) made reference to a small portion of Croatia: Don’s Party which with Bosnia: Not Don’s Party are two of my all-time favourites. A sort of half-hearted and confused umbrage had been taken to my comments about Dubrovnik, a sacred site on its promontory there in the Croatian consciousness.

‘A group of tourists recently published a report from Croatia on their blog, and about Dubrovnik had some criticism. ‘It is very beautiful from a distance. Up close it’s another old town with highly polished limestone streets, including the famous Stradun down its centre,’ the tourists wrote. The criticisms were directed at prices. Namely, tourists wrote that they paid a lot for the most common food. [in fact — ‘Dubrovnik didn’t have as many tat shops as Venice, but it had its share. We paid a lot for ordinary food. Despite its remarkable history as an independent and highly civilised state, we were at a tourist destination.’]

‘Most of the text on Dubrovnik is related to the Homeland War and the attacks by the JNA during the war years. ‘Why would anyone bomb the world heritage? Because of little attention or because you’re stupid. Or to see where you could go with it. Or simply because you do not care,” the tourists wrote. They also visited Cavtat, but they had only praise for it.’

You might be sharing something with your friends, you might think you’re just sharing something with your friends, but of course you’ve thrown yourself on the mercy of the digital cosmos. Once you put it up it’s in the ether, the heavily populated void where anything can and does happen.

I know that if there is a hit from Turkey, it’s probably Onur; Croatia, Don; India (when he’s there) Geoff; Poland, Marta. But today, let me look: 32 from the United States, 6 from Malaysia, 8 from Canada, three from Singapore, two from The Netherlands, one from the UK, and one from Serbia (and will they have read … yes they have … On Being Serbian. I bet they were completely mystified.) I have no idea who any of them are, nor what they are making of what they are reading.

The same is true of course of any author who publishes. However there are well developed gambits, advanced strategies, indeed whole inclinations designed to manage the issue. How much can we tell about Shakespeare’s precise nature or that of Jane Austen from what they wrote? Very little. They are extremely well-disguised; the work is the thing. (As a counterpoint we could always throw in Norman Mailer I guess.) But generally they don’t insert pictures of themselves and their close friends and relations for just anyone to contemplate, and for that matter in order to match the correspondence of text and pictorial evidence.

What’s with this willing abandonment of privacy? Is it perhaps unwitting? If ‘witting’ means ‘fully conscious and attentive’ then there might be something in that. You just do it. And compared with the Twitter wars and the complete abandonment of mannerly and civilised discourse in digital comment, I have got off scot-free. Scot-free. (Originally meaning exempt from Royal levies. Wonderful.) Maybe it’s a process of keeping your head just so high. Not very. Finding the sweet spot whereby you can imagine yourself as an authorial and public figure free to write what you like while retaining an illusion of privacy.

With this in mind, if you search ‘McRae’ or even ‘McRaeblog’ (which is most of the unique address of the site) you will go for dozens of pages before there’s any sign of it. However if you Google ‘Frognie Zila’, and why the hell would you, coming in at number six is this.

And when you go there you will find what’s below, a photo I have taken included in a discussion of what was in Le Printemps in the French Quarter of Shanghai. Note: I have never pulled this out of the run of the blog, nor titled/captioned the photo nor in any other way given it an individual identifier. So how did that happen? Crrrrazy eh. 

I did Google ‘Frognie Zila’ because I was getting so many hits on this as the entry point to my site. When you search, nearby you will find access to an article: ‘6 Bad Brand Names in China: Lessons from intertextuality’ (which includes the same photo, cropped but almost certainly pinched from my site) which says a number of useful things that I had only provided as implications.

Vladimir Djurovic in ‘Branding Mag’ writes: ‘From a purely verbal identity perspective, Chinese consumers have minimal recognition of the name (there is no Godzilla in Chinese culture; frog is not read as evidently as for a Western English speaker). This illuminates the importance of the underlying Chinese name as the verbal identity asset which carries brand equity in China, while the alphabetic name functions as a more visual asset and plays a lesser role in anchoring the memories and brand associations.’ (The other five dud names: ComeBuy; Lance From25; Helen Keller (a brand for spectacles!); Greenland Being Funny (for a shopping mall); and Biemlfdlkk. It is a worthy  but wordy article.)

All serious writing is palimpsest, and the internet is making it easier and more routine.

There now. That’s the educational function of this blog served.

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Geelong? Ah it’s just Geelong. I spent ages 1-8 there, and much as I wanted to, just not quite old enough to go off the wheel into the water at Eastern Beach (see pic above). It’s quiet down there at the other end of the Bay. If you use it as your blog’s yardstick, you can, you know, pump it up a bit. Like, help out.

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Palimpsest. A Footnote. (Another problem with WordPress: you can’t have proper footnotes. No ‘foot’ I suppose.) Originally: parchment or other writing material that the writing has been scrubbed or scraped off so it can be reused. In contemporary usage: something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. In my mind: the building up of layers of borrowings and allusions to thicken out meaning.