Some thoughts about blogging

When I set this blog up I decided to do nothing about pursuing traffic so I have done nothing to bring eyes to this site. I also decided to eschew the two things that are most likely to pull people in to a blog: pictures of women and discussions of politics. I also did not brand myself for any niche market.

People have come in anyway and a surprising number of them.

What's brought them in? Mostly long old posts where I go into detail about Phillipa Foot and the Trolley Problem, Mad Men, Brideshead Revisited, Monstrances, Gaudete Sunday and Jane Austen. In that order, by the way. And it's not too hard to figure out what is happening. When I look at the keyword searches that pull people in, I see that people who are curious about things they've read about going looking for information. This week, for example, The Trolley Problem brought more people in than everything else I wrote; someone must have assigned a term paper on it somewhere.

I've been very gratified at the number of people who find the Brideshead Revisited thread by researching something about the book that puzzled them and decided to stay and go through the entire thread. There is a very steady number who do and every week I see evidence of one or two people going through and I can even follow their progress as they go from each consecutive Chapter in the book to the corresponding entry here by keeping track of pageviews. I have no idea who they are, of course, I just see the progress the way you can see someone walk across the bottom of the Grand Canyon from the top and not even be able to know whether you are watching a man or a woman while you follow their progress. Even more people do so with Mad Men. And a lot of curious Catholics come here looking for information about stuff that has puzzled them and they obviously don't want to ask their priest directly.

An aside: Catholicism is a lot like sex that way, you don't always want to ask someone in authority just in case they tell you to stop doing what you have been doing. And that is just fine with me so long as you don't forget two things. The first is that I have no authority so don't take my opinions as justification for anything you do or don't want to do. The second is that I really am Catholic and there are some issues where I will probably disappoint some of you by saying, "Actually, Benedict is right about this."

Anyway, I am going to focus my efforts on what I see as the quality stuff and a lot of that will have to do with novels and understanding what human virtue is along with the beauty and power of Catholicism as a religion and a culture. I will continue to put some, and perhaps sometimes even lots, of passing comment but I am vain enough that I will focus on the stuff that readers clearly find valuable enough to keep revisiting. I prefer novels that get read more than once and I will focus on producing blog material that is likely to get read more than once. That, of course, is the exact opposite of what most blogging has tended to be about.