Addictive Habits of Bloggers: Guilty

Sometime while I was sick last week, Pot sent me a link to an article on 8 Addictive Habits of Bloggers, which I read with a yep, yep, yep sort of refrain, then forgot about.  I went back looking for it today as grist for the mill.  The abbreviated list of habits is as follows:

  1. Obsessing over subscribers: Yeah that’s not a big one with me, just because I never could really understand now to track subscribers when I was self-hosted, and now that I’m back at wordpress.com, I don’t know how to check that at all.
  2. Checking stats constantly: Biiiiiiig guilty here.  I tried out half a dozen different stats trackers when I was self-hosted and both before I moved and now that I’m back here, I check my stats and hit counter at least a half dozen times a day, probably more.  There’s that whole sense of validation of “someone is reading me!”  Which is probably not entirely accurate, as I believe those stats are only actual hits, not necessarily readers.
  3. Chasing social media traffic: Sort of guilty.  When I decided on my pen name, I wanted to start branding myself such that eventually, when I have a book published, maybe someone will have heard of me.  So I set up a zillion profiles hither and yon (as evidenced by that whole section of my Blogroll devoted to Me Around The Web).  But I certainly haven’t made the most of any of it.  Before, I had a plugin that would ping them all every time I posted, but now…eh, I’m not going to CLOSE the profiles, but it isn’t the best use of my time.
  4. Excessive use of social media: Nope, not guilty on this one.  I’m guilty of setting up the profiles and doing nothing with them.
  5. RSS feeds: Guilty.  How many feeds do I have in my Bloglines?  I’ve got 62 according to the check I just did.  Now, granted, quite a few of those are NOT daily updaters (thank God…I’d never get stuff read).  I’ve got probably a dozen of those that are food blogs I read for recipes, which is usually a quick process.  But then I’ve got all the writing blogs.  I do have a lot of them.  And from time to time they pile up, and I do a quick skim and ignore.  And yeah, they are a time suck.  From time to time I go through and purge the ones that I have not been actually READING or that I feel like I’m not getting a lot out of.
  6. Forums: I’ve been guilty of this in the past, but I didn’t get enough out of it that I felt bad dropping them when I got busy.  Now I mostly use forums to ask questions, get answers, and move on.
  7. Rankings: Not so much guilty on this one.  I have all those little links in Internet Love and once a month or so I’ll check out myself in Blogpulse, etc., but I am so far below ranked on Alexa, etc. that it’s not worth the waste of my time to check.  I am small potatoes.
  8. Email/IM: Guilty.  Googletalk is always up when I’m online.  Granted, most of my people are on Yahoo Messenger, AIM, or some others, so it’s only a select handful whom I talk to on a daily basis.  And I check email religiously.  When that little tone chimes to say that I’ve got mail, I instantly go check it.

To that list, I’d like to add creating too many blogs.  I am 100% guilty of that, as evidenced by my bloghopping in search of the perfect hosting site and screen name, as well as the various special interest blogs I’ve developed and dropped when I didn’t have the time.  It’s a good thing I’m not in this for the money.

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