Comment-Free Blogging

I recently watched the movie Julia & Julie on TV. The film is about two people. One is Julia Child and her early days in cooking, leading up to her first cookbook publication in the late 1940s. The other person is Julie, a woman who in 2003 decided to make every recipe in Julia’s cookbook over the course of a year, and write about her trials and tribulations in a blog.

As a guy who has a blog, I found this idea of Julie’s blog to be a bit puzzling, and perhaps simply improbable, although the movie was supposedly based on two true stories. See, Julie was putting a year’s worth of significant effort into an undertaking for the single purpose of describing it in a blog. How would anyone every come upon this blog? How would it ever get any readers? I have wandered around the internet, and I have come upon free, personal blogs with various themes. Some are cat-oriented blogs, some are car blogs, and some are food blogs. A lot of them haven't even a single comment at the bottom of their various entries from some would-be reader, and those that do have a comment or two seem to be from friends or relatives. Many, and in fact probably most of the blogs I have come upon are non-active. They have been forgotten by their creators. My guess is that they have been abandoned because they never found a reader. Now these blogs are like cyber ghost towns with a last entry in, for example, June of 2006.

As hard as it is to believe, I actually put some effort into my nitwitty blog. I mean, I come up with something to write about, usually jot down the idea so I won’t forget it, and then when I get to my computer, start in on the blog entry. Once I’ve written the entry, I’ll proofread it several times and make small, and sometimes even wholesale changes to it. The average blog entry takes me about an hour, all told. I think of it as a hobby. I would never go through any real hardship with the idea that I’ll tell the world about what I’m doing via a blog. No one reads an ordinary person’s blog. And I mean it really can be pretty much no one. And of course without a single reader, word-of-mouth is not possible, so “no one” usually remains no one.

So as I was watching Julia & Julie, I was wondering; who would brutalize himself or herself with a difficult task simply to write about it in a blog? Also, by the end of the movie, Julie’s blog had thousands of readers. How did that happen? For me, the whole blog-thing hurt the credibility of the movie. It just did not seem realistic. 

I’ve recently discovered that my blog has a feature that will not only give me the numbers concerning my readership, but in what country the readers reside. Over the last month I have had six blog entries and a total of four readers. That’s less than one reader per blog post. Of the four readers last month, one was in the United States, one was in Germany, one was in Russia, and one was in Latvia, of all places. That Russian reader must really be a fan. The months that I have but a single reader, that person is usually the reader in Russia.

I wonder if Julie’s blog was read by anyone in Latvia. It would be nice to think that it wasn’t.