View source for RainDog's Editorial

This page presents RainDog's '''primal rant'''. Wikipedia defines [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rant rant] as follows:

:"A rant is a widespread and distinctive phenomenon of emotional speech or writing in the form of a series of complaints or attacks, about a topic of interest, many times political in nature."

The Wikipedia article lists a selection of rant sites. See for example [http://www.justrage.com justrage].

"Primal" refers to either [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Primal_Scream primal scream] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_Therapy primal therapy]. In any case the main idea evoked is that of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain pain].

See also RainDog's blog at [[User:RainDog]].

== RainDog's First Rant ==

I thought that if I created a website my output would get on Google and at least a few people somewhere would read some of it. But I've created about 6 websites so far and NOBODY EVEN LOOKS AT ANY OF THEM. The statistics show that I am generally the only visitor on all of them.

(If you are by some quirk of fate reading this please send an email quick to [mailto:conviviality@ouvaton.org conviviality@ouvaton.org] to let me know the good news. Or log on to this wiki and edit ANYTHING.)

My main [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools] website was visited by a Google bot or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler web crawler], probably because I tried to register the site on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_Project Open Directory] (which is about as "open" as a locked bank vault). But the Google robot only crawled the first page of the site, and that page comes up so far down on the Google listings that I can't even find it myself.

Of course there are techniques for boosting websites upwards in the Google listings. There are even [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization Search Engine Optimisation] (SEO) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb#motivations contests] where competitors try to come out on top of some arbitrary weird Google search. But I'm too busy developing content to pay attention to all that.

There also seem to be lots of other factors: the creators of successful sites or blogs are in contact with a community, or they have lots of friends, or their topics interest more people, or maybe sometimes they are just lucky. Whatever it takes, I obviously lack.

So why am I spending my time developing content for a series of websites that no one sees? Some possible answers:

* Because this is my fate, like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus Sisyphus] forever rolling the rock back up the hill.
* Because maybe someday something will change, and someone will read a page or two somehow.
* Because the content can always be used elsewhere, such as copied onto Wikipedia or onto some other wiki.
* And just because.

- September 2007

[[Category:RainDog's Opinions]]