I'm a bad, bad blogger

Perhaps I took on too much for my plate, not one, not two, but three and sometimes more blogs at the same time. As regular readers of Podunk know I have over the last year had a number of sibling blogs to accompany my musings from Podunk. There's my HockeyNation blog, which with the return of hockey finally had a reason to be kept up to date, and has rewarded me with a terrific return of viewers over the last month.

Over the last year I've had a blog called boondoggle which was dedicated to the silly shenanigans of our ruling class, while there was no shortage of material from our federal, provincial and municipal officials, I found that it was getting a short shrift and sent it to Blog heaven a few months ago. The scandals however continue unabated, with such a wealth of material I just lump them into the Podunk blog now.

There was another little effort called the Podunkian politico, which had a very short shelf life, kind of a clearing house of all my political blogs, I deep sixed it as well, figuring it was a tad redundant, since most of the material had been created on the Podunk blog. I felt like I was just wasting blog space for some other deserving blogger, so bye bye politico it was.

Which brings me to my final blog, a little project I put together due to my enjoyment of the Canadian Football League. I had noticed over the years that the NFL and even Arena Football (good God who watches that) had numerous blogs out there for their sports, but hardly anything was there for the CFL, so I created Twelve Men on the Field. It got off to a great start, I was rather dedicated in my posts and tried to keep it up to date as best as possible.

However, it soon became apparent that the hits for it were nowhere near the volume that the HockeyNation would gain, or even Podunk for that matter. As the summer waned and the hockey season began I found I spent less and less time on the twelve men front. In fact I haven't added to it or maintained the thing since the 11th of September, I'm not proud of that fact, but it just didn't seem to hold my attention the last little while.

It's interesting this little diversion we call blogging, some days you can rattle off a dozen items for your creation and others when you couldn't come up with an idea to save your soul. There are days when you receive a landslide of attention and some days you wonder if anybody is reading at all.

You can of course create some excitement to add to your numbers. Sean at seanincognito recently posted an item that by simply suggesting porn on his site, his numbers would multiply exponentially. Britney's boobs it would seem are a big attraction on the wired universe. I recently did a story that merely mentioned the name Enron and watched my counter flip over and over for a steady couple of hours, disgraced stock listings like porn are also apparently a draw to the blogsphere. I even had a little local excitement on this blog when I did a blurb on our local election campaign here in Podunk, I suddenly discovered I had been found out in my own little town, when my site meter showed numerous hits from the home of Podunk and I hadn't even logged on to correct or update an article in hours.

Which all leads me back to my football blog, as the CFL season winds down I wonder if I should even bother trying to play catch up on it. I wouldn't mind keeping it alive til the end of the season, especially as we get closer and closer to the Grey Cup. Then I can try and figure out if there really is an interest for a blog about the CFL. I kept it going this far because of a love for the CFL, but with a counter tally of less than 20 hits on a given day it seemed like a lot of work for little return, time spent on it could be better spent on Podunk and HockeyNation which at least have a core of regular viewers.

I'm thinking of taking a page out of seanincognito's book and tying in the Minnesota Vikings recent scandal into my CFL blog, something like "CFL players read the papers with interest as tales of ribald behavior on a Viking cruise turned into a sex scandal". It would be cheap and a tad deceptive, but I bet on that day my "hits" would fly through the roof.

Scandal can sell, as can sex, sadly for the CFL I guess there's not much of either to bring in the trollers to the blog. Sometimes just showcasing the football isn't enough it seems. Something I have to think about as I try to figure out if I want to keep the Twelve men on the field on the blog.