It truly is a vast wasteland.

Look over my SiteMeter stats and it becomes glaringly obvious that since joining SiteMeter, my peak readership for Da Blog has been in November and December, when my college football rankings, SNF Flex Scheduling Watch, and (not next year) SuperPower ratings are in full swing.

The rest of the time, I barely break 100 readers for the whole month, or about 3-4 a day. By those standards, I shouldn't be disappointed by the readership numbers for Sandsday!

Currently, the poll on the front page of the web site has the following most popular topics with 4 votes each: Sports (well covered), Movies (well, if I can get the Greatest Movies Project off the ground...), Video Games (evidently the Sandsday crowd), RPGs, Politics (forthcoming), and the current overall leader with 5 votes, Computing/Internet.

As for my original Da Blog Poll, asking what you'd like to see out of Da Blog, the three leaders in the clubhouse are: Short poems or stories I've written, TV Ratings Reports, and Sports Watcher. TV ratings reports are out of the question; they take too long and are too much work. I heartily recommend TV by the Numbers for much more in-depth coverage than I ever had in mind.


Sports Watcher is coming back on a provisional basis this weekend and possibly for good, aided by Blogger's new Scheduled Posts feature, allowing me to work on the Watcher throughout the week instead of all at once on Friday. At this point, publishing short poems or stories I've written is a) probably going to be more a web site thing than a blog thing and b) will mostly be the ones I think are less publishable. My interests have shifted since writing them into more philosophic strains.


I've reposted the topic poll under the new mechanism, removing the three most popular items, and replacing them with four new ones: TV schedule reports (know exactly what's going to be on direct from the source!), philosophical treatises, live election results based on my projection mechanisms (which are coming for November's general election anyway), and random discoveries from the Internet. (I'm not a subscriber to StumbleUpon, but I was interested in the concept when I was semi-accidentially introduced to it.) Given the pace at which my polls get votes, this one will last until the end of July, although if I get enough votes suggestions from it will start filtering into Da Blog and the web site before then.

Now for another question. In a recent comment, someone suggested "send[ing my] posts to other bloggers". (Ironically, this was in a post about my inability to get readers for Sandsday, not Da Blog.) Two problems with that: I'm not certain who to send it to, and I don't want to feel like I'm spamming other bloggers. I am already on the blogroll of Sports Media Watch, but no place else to my knowledge; I haven't had a response to any of my posts on a blog recognized by Technorati; and I'm a bit put off by the concept of blogrolls myself, partly because some of my interests are a little embarrasing for me to discuss, partly because it seems cliqueish, and partly because what I read is none of your business. Unless I decide it is. As a result, I have a bit of a beef with blogs like Awful Announcing that seemingly will only link to me if I link to them in a blogroll.

It doesn't help that both of the blogs I referred to in the previous paragraph are sports blogs and I don't want Da Blog to just be a sports blog. So I welcome any advice in the comments on how to branch out and how to get more inbound links. And I'm starting a second poll question - the first multi-question Da Blog Poll - asking whether I should spam other blogs. Because it's simple, this one's only lasting through the end of the month.