Our Bloggies, Ourselves

           as blog is
        to write.as world
             self is
          to real world

           it's all in
        the presentation
         the putting it
            out there
                
             or not

But then is it miso to the engagement rescue!

What I know is that those who really want to engage, will engage. But that's not a lot of people. It's the minority.

Does that suggest they're not very engaging people? <sarcastic cough>

Now what's in between is people that might engage, potentially. If it's easy. If it's not too demanding. If there's a way to do it that's simple. But there's no such way here — which is actually pretty interesting. Having the technical possibility to do it in an easier way might increase engagement on the surface, but I'm not sure it would do it in a very meaningful way.

It doesn't help that “meaningful” means different things to different people.

Seat of the pants theorizing about possible “engagement events”:

(There are likely others I'm not thinking of, so I defer to CJ Eller for technical completeness.)

Given something like the above, a blogger's “stats” page could reflect those counts, but also provide a search mechanism whose queries were logical combinations of those engagement event names. Searching on “article-read” would surface a lot more results than “article-url-referenced and content-quoted”, for example.

And, of course, one could be even pickier about what constituted engagement. Perhaps someone doesn't feel an engagement is worth their time unless someone else not only read their article, but quoted from it and referenced both the article and author URLs in another article (i.e. “article-read and article-url-referenced and blog-url-referenced and content-quoted”).

(It occurs to me the reason “article-read” is important is that prevents hits against articles in which someone else's engagement events were merely copied, but they never read the URL being referenced.)

Those who don't mind notifications could provide such a query to a notification engine, which wouldn't be too different from the query mechanism except one is notified through some mechanism every time the query matches a new post.

That's actually appealing. Anyone can write without ever knowing if someone interacted or reacted with what they have written. It's kind of liberating too. We're broadcasting messages in a unidirectional way. Engaging is a hack. The writing from people seem much more genuine than on other places. We're not here to look cool in front of others, just to exchange with our own experience and self reflections. It's like a social network that's not social and offers no real network.

Yeah, there's no doubt about the bliss of ignorance.

Until curiosity knocks at the front door, of course.

But maybe it's better one can't satisfy that curiosity without working for it?

People not looking to engage can simply ignore it. We're all on our own virtual island radioing (is that a word?) to each other, and we decide if we want to tune-in to other islands transmitters.

But I want to be on an island with both Ginger and Mary Ann! Ginger and Mary Ann! :–)

Elsewhere, miso shared this simple breathing exercise

  1. Breath in deeply
  2. Breath in deeply
  3. Breath in deeply
  4. Ask yourself: what is important right now?

That's it.

I will try to do that every now and then.

which was some pretty fun timing given I did exactly that last night – albeit with a cigar.... >_<

This here post gives me hope for the future of the species.

I can definitely relate to aspects of miso's backstep. Solitude is super important to me. But I also like having a relationship, and Requests For Solitude can invoke hurt feelings, which can lead to arguments – which is, of course, practically the precise relationship-mathematical inverse of solitude.

tmo never fails to be the consummate “virtual island” (see above's engagement ruminations with miso) blogger, this time with his suggesting a little something called “trying” tends to be absent in social networking realms. This is just scary too spot on:

I feel bad for those still using FB and sites like it. Almost every social networking platform have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in helping the human race, changing their ad-based methodology of user manipulation, or even being a company that provides a positive experience. They are social cancer.

Anyway, peoples, just your friendly blogborhood engagement hound with a little of this, and a little of that while kinda sorta working in degrees of post THC/alcohol cloudiness from the night before after attending a dinner party I could have taken or left. The discourse was often pleasant, but for the most part it was cookie-cutter “same old”.

However, the hostess surprised me quite pleasantly by having me taste a vodka, which I described as being rather Ketel One (my fave) -ish... but it turns out she's able to acquire for just $NINE per 1.75L, which is utterly unprecedented given the quality. I took two off her hands at the end of the visit, and now am actually mourning the fact she and her partner are planning on leaving the area for a quite remote place in a few months.

I don't blame her, but dang... that means eventually traveling into the city to score some, which I'm wincing at even as I type for the city in question seeming rather sucky to me.