Trend Monitoring - Blogging In The Flight Levels
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Want To Know What’s Going To Happen?
Here’s a nice little intersection of professional, or at least serious, blogging, and the protocols of high-performance, high-altitude jet flight. Not long ago as part of Problogger’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, Darren presented participants the task of Digging Into Your Blogs Statistics. Similarly, Chris posted about his breaking the Technorati Top 100K on Chrisblogging. Read those two articles, if you haven’t already, and what follows here will make even more sense.
Watch What Develops!
Trend monitoring is a mandatory procedure in professional flying. The pilots flying the last airliner you were on ,whenever that was, at some point may very well have spent a few minutes systematically reviewing the instruments and, importantly, making log entries into some kind of notebook to record the present readings for comparison to the last few sets of entries.
The “why” of this concept should be obvious. 45,000 feet is not the place to discover that your pressurization system has been developing a problem that is about to…um…explode on you! That’s one example of a problem you’ll want to catch onto early!!
You don’t have to be at the helm of a jet airplane for this to make sense, pilots of small personal planes should probably be doing the same thing for the same reason. I personally know a couple of individuals who do this sort of exercise for their cars…maybe a bit OCD but you can’t be too safe can you?
Inflight Blogging Emergencies?
Well…no, but wouldn’t it be helpful to know a few basic stats? Here’s an excerpt from Chris on his Technorati experience:
“The first time that I checked my ranking it was 700,100. Of course, this was a few months back after my first post. As of writing this, my ranking has dropped to 94,996. As you can see, this is not the best ranking, but it does show that I am moving in the right direction. Even more so it shows that other bloggers are willing to link to ChrisBlogging.”
It’s the “…moving in the right direction” part that I focused on. If you checked Alexa every so often and noticed a spike…in one direction or another…in traffic, you might want to revisit your activity for that time period to see what you may have been doing, or not doing, that caused the spike. For example if I saw that I had a jump in traffic at a certain point in time and I could look back and see that it corresponded to when I was on vacation and had guest writers at the helm…that, I suppose, would tell me something…like maybe I waited too long to take that vacation! Thank you Darren, for this example.
Keep In Touch
I think you get the idea here. This is not a post about the statistical analysis of adsense placements, I’m talking about keeping in touch with how your blog is being received out there in the wider sphere. If you have an idea of what works well and what might not be worth the trouble, you’ll have a better chance of maximizing your efforts, and time…something many of us have too little of for this shared passion…to get the best results from your blog.
You may yet find yourself in the smooth air at FL450….above the weather and the congestion…cruising along on autopilot…ahhh success - whatever it is for you and your blog. 
tcs @ August 22, 2007
Isn’t that we are all struggling with? always wondering how our blogs are being received by all!! But I can say YOU are doing a superb job at it Tom… I wish I could make my blog look as nice as yours, just like you said, I struggle with time issues all the time!
Would you like to share with some of us n00bies how you achieve this sort of smooth sailing?
I will say this much Pearl…most of the “smooth sailing” I’ve experienced in this adventure has come about with your support and guidance…and I’ll be back for more, you can count on that