Cat Moon Shadow

Perhaps it shows me to be of a certain age.     But I have to admit that the first thing that came to mind on seeing today’s three words is of course Cat Stevens’  immortal song Moon Shadow. To me this song,  by this artist is as perfect a take on these three words as any I could ever hope to produce.   And yet,  here I am trying.

It does seem to me,   that while NaNoWriMo  may help me to improve my final score   (the last I checked I had blogged on 78.6% of the days in 2012.   I am hoping to raise that into the mid-eighty percents by the end of the year,   just because I will be more comfortable having achieved a solid B in my goal.   Even though one of the biggest lessons I will take away from the ‘blog every day in 2012′  experiment is that publishing a new post every day is not in most bloggers’ best interest.     While it is possible that you will build a fan base that is both large enough and insatiable enough to follow your daily posts,   in most cases you will end up with more readers, more visibility and more impact by publishing less frequently than once a day.

I also think that a collaborative blog could be really successful.    Three or four bloggers alternating days might be able to create a very compelling site,  although it could be very stressful I think,  if the collaborators had different priorities and different levels of commitment to the project.    Part of me thinks that it is just ‘negative thinking’  to speculate about such problems….when I am speaking only theoretically and am not in fact planning any collaborative project as I describe.   (The part of me that has been dealing with people online for years knows how difficult it can be to bet a hobbyist writer to meet any deadline,  and one that recurred once or twice each week…..well let’s just say that there are a lot of folks out there who would never keep up with that level of commitment,  however enthusiastically they might embrace it going in.   In my own personal experience, collaborating on a blog was much better in theory than in practice.

I do seem to be in a mood to write more.    I published a second piece in just a few days on my largely ignored politics blog.    I also re-published that new piece on Broowaha,   a citizen journalism newspaper that I sometimes contribute to.    I don’t ever expect that I will be a top  contributor on Broowaha,   but in most cases the pieces I publish there get a great many more page views than I am mostly ever able to achieve on this blog.    And one nice thing about that site is that I have inserted my own AdSense code and I do receive paid AdSense page views  and rewards for ad clicks on those pieces.   I’ve mentioned before that I am just one of zillions of web publishers who worked for years before ever realizing that what I was doing would probably never accumulate the 100 dollars in earnings Google requires you to accrue before they will deign to cut a check.      But if your articles can fit into any of the newspaper’s categories,   it is not a bad place to seed some articles and earn a few pennies for your work.

And finally today,  my thanks to Kamal Bennani  who suggested today’s words.