Around The World

One of the things that many bloggers have on their sites is a meter to show how many visitors the site has received. Having such a meter means that you know whether people are dropping by or you are writing for an audience of one.

I had a comment from The Witch Doctor welcoming me to the blogosphere after my second post, so I knew early on that I had written something that had attracted the attention of another blogger, but that did not mean that there would be anyone else who knew of my existence. Would I be writing my best material, probably when I should have been spending and hour or two studying, and nobody else would take any notice of what I said? Then I wrote something which attracted the attention of The Jobbing Doctor and he kindly put a link to my blog from his, and before I knew it there were lots of people looking at my blog.

So what has this got to do with meters? Well, the one that I have on my blog allows me to see whereabouts in the world the people who drop in on the blog live. Understandably the majority of visitors have been from the UK, but what has surprised me is the fact that people from the USA, Canada, Australia, France, Egypt and the Republic of Ireland have also found their way there, and I can look at a map to prove it.

This means that the blog is a bit like having penfriends as you did when you were at school. But the difference is that there is no expensive postage to pay, and lots of penfriends can read the same "letter" no matter where in the world they are. Another benefit is that you can write in your native tongue and it is up to the reader to translate if he doesn't speak your language. I had a German penfriend when I was at school; he spoke little or no English, so I had to write to him in German as well as receiving his letters in his native tongue. That would have been okay if I could have understood what he was writing. My language teacher was teaching me to speak and write German in a grammatically correct manner, but my penfriend was writing colloquially which meant that half the time I had no real idea what he was talking about. I'm not a great letter writer at the best of times but trying to write letters in a foreign language soon defeated me and my penfriend was a penfriend no longer.

So to all the "penfriends" around the world who have read my blog, either through direction from The Jobbing Doctor or because they found me by chance, I would like to say thanks very much for bothering and I hope that you will read me again sometime.

PS. Please drop me a comment too so that I know what you do and don't like about my blog.