Tuesday, May 27, 2008

How Often Do you Cater to Your Audience?

I tend to think a certain kind of mental voyeurism is involved in blogging. As bloggers, we want to show the innermost aspects of our souls to complete strangers for some bizarre reason. Some of us do this through fiction while others simply explore why we do what we do and we are guilty of mental masturbation.

While I know that the use of that phrase is going to cause some interesting searches to come my way when this gets indexed by Google, assuming the site that indexes my blog does not steal my traffic, it still fits, although I warn you if you were looking for a post that is about sex, you will be sadly disappointed. (There are posts on the site where I've explored my fear of this common institution and its possible sources. Sadly, these are interest only to a therapist who might want to know why I don't have an intimate relationship with anyone.)

Although I do have a hard time getting along with people, I seem to be willing to let people come here and comment on my life for good or ill. I do not expect everyone to agree with my viewpoint on the Mormon church or why it is the way it is, nor do I expect a reader to understand that everything I say.

But after a time I learned who was reading my blog and decided to cater posts to those people. I guess we all do it someway, because I never expected anyone to read something I wrote simply because I wrote it. This, more than anything else speaks to some fundamental need of the blogger that causes them to flash others with their naked souls, so to speak. I do not know whether this is good or bad. It simply is. How many of us would read C.L. Hansen's blog if she did not openly talk about things that would normally remain hidden or Arizona Awakening's blog if we were not interested in seeing where his spiritual journey leads.

I have been lax in updating. I will not tell you that I intend to stop the infrequent updates because I'm not sure that is true.. I have been busy writing for online sites and trying to reach my goal of seeing my name in print. I still have quite a long way to go before the print dream becomes a reality, although writing online has improved my writing and specifically how I write online content when the intent is to bring in visitors. (This is a whole different ball game.)

For those who want to know who I've been writing for, I will e-mail you the names I write under, but I do not want this blog linked with my real name for reasons that should be obvious.