Most of my life, I have been
a quite ardent disciple of the virtue of longevity, which proclivity has
extended beyond things which can be felt or touched. It has transcended to things that I do like
write or collect stuff.
I have had my blog site at
the nascent time when blogging was just exploding in numbers and kind in the
Internet. When most anybody who was
somebody in the social, political, and business and finance firmaments felt the
need to start one for their adherents to
worship in. And indeed, overnight the
numbers exploded into the millions and filled every corner in the Internet.
My blog whose title has without
permission co-opted the name of somebody quite famous and influential in the
religious realm. It is called, The
Ignatian Perspective, and has been in existence since May of 2004. To this day, it has been visited by almost
half a million viewers, about 430,000 of them.
It has accumulated over 546
entries. Depending on the subject
discussed readership of each entry has wildly fluctuated, from many thousands
to less than 50. One entry gathered a total of about 20,000 readers and over
300 comments, and was about the Neri Genealogy.
Conventional wisdom and maybe
the human inclination to want to have more readers would dictate that one
writes about things that your readers would like to read.
But is that the overriding
intent here? I once tried to find out by
experiment what the effect would be if I tried that route.
There was breaking news in
the US city where we were residing. An
older American guy was found dead by apparent suicide, jumping from a
second-storey hotel window. He had lived
in the Philippines and had married an aging but very popular Filipino
actress. The American had left the
country with the pending case against him for the murder of the wife.
The blog entry was simply a
first-person eye-witness account of the place where the suicide happened. Almost instantly, readership spiked to a
couple of thousands. And it felt good
while it lasted.
Unfortunately, the intent of
the blog was for an entirely different purpose.
I had simply wanted to have a
permanent but easy-access medium to translate my thoughts to written form, to
record for posterity. With the silent
hope that somehow when I am gone those who will remain could find the time to
pore over the entries I had painstakingly created over the many years in
existence.
