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On My Deathbed I Won’t Care About My Technorati Ranking, or, The Seduction of Measurement.
I like blogging about what I’m interested in, I’d like to make my income from it someday. And I want to get better at it. I want to get better and better at writing posts. So it’s handy if there is some kind of measure that I can use.
One of the measures used by bloggers is Technorati. This gives a ranking to your blog compared with all the other blogs in the blogosphere. I’m happy when my Technorati ranking goes up.
And yet what Technorati measures is not the quality of the writing. It uses several ways to measure – how many people look at my blog, how many people link to it and so on. All of this is nice to know, but is only indirectly related to how good my writing is. But there aren’t any on line measures of how good someone’s writing is, so I need to use Technorati (or some similar system).
This is what I’m calling “the seduction of measurement”. I’m not measuring exactly what I want to know but I do have a measure to use. The seduction is that I then tend to use this measure for assessing how good my blog (and my writing on it) is.
It is good to have goals and measure our progress towards them. The question is: are they measuring the right thing. As the cliche has it: we may get to the top of the ladder to find that it was leaning against the wrong wall.
What measures do you use to see if you are progressing toward your goals? Do you take time out occasionally to re-assess your goals and ensure that they are still the goals you want to be pursuing?
Stay the course Evan , Stay the course
Thanks Don,
I hope to – and comments like yours help me along the way.
Evan , I believe in working hard and committing to your heart in everything I do. It is not for everyone as my friend Caroline recently pointed out in her post , prompted by an article I had written. Its just the way I am wired. I work very hard at my sites , but the satisfaction and rewards it provides are priceless. I say stay the course , because I say that to myself everyday. Put your habd to the plow and dont look back my freind
Evan,
I hadn’t taken time out to access my goals for quite awhile. I allowed circumstances to dictate directions. Honestly, some of the circumstances were unavoidable. And when I did work toward a goal in the middle of those life-takes- precedence scenes, my goals were clouded or not realized as fully as they might have been. It seems there just wasn’t enough time to keep the focus clear. I guess juggling too many balls kept me from becoming more skilled with fewer.
Circumstances eventually and inevitably changed. My goal pursuing that had been put on hold, got dropped right in front of me. Once again, I seemed to be in a little or no choice situation. It was too large an obstacle to go around or ignore. I needed to do something about it.
That is where I find myself today, where I have been for almost three years. It seems like a long time not to have a tangible thing in my hand to say, here is the result of all this work. Here is what I want. I can finally see the direction I am moving. I guess the best way to look at it is, it must be a bigger goal than I thought.
Hi Barbara,
The lack of tangibles can be very difficult, at least for me. It may be possible to come up with measures like different responses to the same situation or things I don’t do anymore or new behaviours started, these are things I’ve used to get some concreteness about how I’ve changed.
I too think that life often needs to take precedence over our goals. This seems unavoidable to me – I just don’t control everything that happens to me.
I hope you are managing to do something about the obstacle.
Thankyou for your thoughtful and personal comment, I very much appreciate it.