Mini-milestone: 1777

Lately, I tend to view these milestone posts rather as one might a box of chocolates; over the previous 15 days (since the last mini-milestone - 111 posts in 15 days, whew!) I've managed to collect an interesting assortment of blog-related occurrences, each of which has added some unique flavour or texture to the overall experience.

One was the discovery (quite by accident) that I have been added to yet another blogroll; I thank you for that Bear Schmear: Tales From the Blogoqueer, who generally leaves comments at Joe.My.God as "richeyrich". I haven't had a great deal of time to peruse his site, but I'm definitely getting caught up on my workload here, so I may have a spare hour or two to do just that next week.

My various experiments with viral marketing have proven highly successful on two separate occasions: first, a link left in the comments at Joe.My.God to one of my earlier posts - Oscar Night Bum Fight - was briefly my most popular entry page, due entirely to traffic from Haloscan; a second attempt was equally successful, linking to one of my better recent pieces, RIP Norman Mailer. All told, I have Joe.My.God to thank for at least half of my traffic whenever I am able to comment extensively over there.

The majority of my traffic still comes from the American Northeast, which suits me just fine, although European traffic is up recently, due to my more-extensive-than-usual coverage of royal news (thank you House of Bourbon!). I still don't have the quantity of comments I'd like, but my hits (and more importantly, reads) are trending upwards very nicely. I am still on the lookout for a UK blog from which I can hope to entice a few more readers.

Phase Two of the viral marketing campaign is about to begin, with my own reintroduction into Vancouver's spoken word/open mike circuit; simply informing people about the blog and/or sending them links which I felt were pertinent to them seems to be driving a considerable amount of new traffic to the site. Likewise, there is now a Pop Culture Institute group on Facebook - open to all, naturally - and I've recently begun adding content to that as well, in the hopes that it will eventually serve as portal to and from the blog.

Otherwise, what feels like the glacial pace of progress is gradually moving various other ideas forward; additionally, I've begun reprinting articles from Pop Culture Institute at Self-Loathario, whenever I feel they'd be more appropriate over there.

All told there are 43 days left in the year, during which time I plan to publish 231 posts - which is just a smidge over 5 per day and, like Jake Gyllenhaal, utterly do-able. The next mini-milestone is at 1888; see you there when I see you there!

~ MSM