Seriously.  I've taken a course, I'm trained and I know tricks.

Last night, prior to stumbling upon Kind of Blue's post  Pitbulls in Spamalot is Eating Away My Brain, I was whining to my husband that, even in my short time here at OS, I've grown weary of the same posts sitting in the upper right hand corner.  It's my paranoid contention that either the algorithm that selects the most viewed is written with faulty logic, or the links are hard coded.  It would seem I am not alone in being tired of the seemingly stagnant list.

Of course, not making the top 10 Most Viewed posts on OS isn't really the proverbial bee stuck in my bonnet.  A lack of ratings/comments on my posts isn't my problem either. (See Emma Peel's Why are ratings so terribly important to some people at OS? for a thoughtful discussion on the subject.) While I would like validation and praise (from someone other than my mother), what I'm really after is views.

Of course, I write for my own entertainment first and foremost.  I also write to silence the voice in my head that dictates prose, often too sarcastic to repeat, in a rather snarky tone of voice.  Originally I was happily posting notes on Facebook for the reading and amusement of my friends and family.  Then one day my friend (whom I will probably never forgive) suggested that I post my stories on OS.  So, periodically I posted copies of my notes without much of a second thought.   Until one of my posts, Really I Understand. The Rules Just Don't Apply To You, actually got more than 10 views.

 This miracle, got me to keeping an eye on the Most Recent tab.  In part because I wanted to see how my stories were faring, but also to see how the other recent posters were doing.  Most of my posts average somewhere between 25-40 views.  Not great, but not tragic either.  However I've noticed a bunch of posts that have 1 view or maybe 6 views.  Not rated or commented on, and barely read.  And that seems somewhat disheartening.  If we're blogging and no one is reading, then we're pretty much talking to ourselves more often than we used to.

 By my estimation, on most days, an average blogger has 25 - 45 minutes of front page time where their post appears in the lower right hand corner.  Unless of course you post in the midst of an OS blogger vs. blogger cat fight, then you're lucky if you're up there for 10 minutes. Once you fall off the front, you're pretty much done for being read by the masses.  The diligent poll trollers, I suspect, peruse the fuller list under the Most Recent tab, and you've got about another 2-4 hours where your post will stay on the first page of that list.  Once you're on to page two, you're pretty much yesterday's blog.

It seems a fleeting hope to have a post that warrants being featured on the cover, particularly if your subject matter isn't timely, and being Editor's Pick seems to be a special feature flagged of some accounts, where it seems that everything they post winds up tagged Editor's Pick, while other excellent posts make their way to the archives unread.   

So, I repeat, Who Does A Girl Have To Blow To Around Here To Get Read? (Or if I'm lucky will the title alone do the trick?)