Well, at least it feels like a brush with fame

It's nice when my Facebook feed brings together things I love (for those not in the know, the voice of Anglophone Cultures Uni Mainz has a special relationship to yours truly):

We've now found the one context in which neither of us minds saying: 'I'm a believer.'

Glad to know that Billy is with us on this.

Hot content

Finally, after nearly five years, I realise that I've been doing this whole blogging thing wrong.

Unlike, as I learn via the New York Times, one Heather Armstrong:

Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

Wow, outstanding, how do they manage that?

By talking about poop and spit up. And stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs. And home design, and high-strung dogs, and reality television, and sewer-line disasters, and chiropractor visits. And countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read.

This suggests that, should we want to be more successful with this whole new media thingy, we should, as Oprah might put it, 'share a bit more of ourselves'.

Of course, there's a definite shortage of 'poop and spit up' in our four walls about which to opine.

Though, I have to say, keeping things that way definitely seems worth 30-40 grand a month.

Possibly more.

Brief aspirational aside

Now added to the list of Things I Want to See Happen: a race horse with the same name as this blog. If other blogs can have one, why can't we?

(C'mon, it would at least be better than 'Yorkshire Knight'...)