{"id":877,"date":"2014-09-11T22:49:23","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T06:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/biz141.inmotionhosting.com\/~akweko6\/sacollins.com\/wp\/?p=877"},"modified":"2014-09-11T22:49:23","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T06:49:23","slug":"the-haze-and-maze-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/?p=877","title":{"rendered":"The Haze and Maze of Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">The Haze and Maze of Social Media<\/span><\/h1>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Okay, I&#8217;m a techie. I mean, I work in the IT world and all of its variety of devices, servers, and networking security ins and outs. So you&#8217;d think that I&#8217;d understand how and why my website stats are what they are. But I don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>I check my stats on this site from time to time. My audience is growing &#8211; steadily. Not bot combing either. These are actual human web surfing hits &#8211; not bot or spider crawls (at least not that I can tell). If they are then they&#8217;ve got some serious smart spiders now.<\/p>\n<p>I checked it today, you wanna know what I found?<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, I am BIG in China.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_878\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/biz141.inmotionhosting.com\/~akweko6\/sacollins.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/stock-footage-chinese-flag-hd-looped.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-878\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-878\" src=\"http:\/\/biz141.inmotionhosting.com\/~akweko6\/sacollins.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/stock-footage-chinese-flag-hd-looped-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"This one surprises the hell outta me... I like it, but I don't know what it means.\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/stock-footage-chinese-flag-hd-looped-300x168.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/stock-footage-chinese-flag-hd-looped.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-878\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This one surprises the hell outta me&#8230; I like it, but I don&#8217;t know what it means.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>As of today (September 11th) my stats are just shy of hits for the entire month of August. So I know I am gonna surpass it in a day or so. So yeah, my audience is growing. But why China? It&#8217;s not like my stuff is in Chinese. I don&#8217;t think its Baidu doing the crawling.<\/p>\n<p>But China surpassed the good ol&#8217; US of A this week.\u00a0 Here&#8217;s the rundown &#8211;<\/p>\n<p>1) China<\/p>\n<p>2) USA<\/p>\n<p>3) France\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (this one I can sort of understand because well. they&#8217;re French for Chrissake)<\/p>\n<p>4) Canada\u00a0\u00a0 (I LOVE me my Cannucks!)<\/p>\n<p>5) Some EU country\u00a0\u00a0 (What the fuck does <em>THAT<\/em> mean?!)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The Ukraine is next and THEN Great Britain. Sorta wacky weird how this whole thing works. It sort of reminds me when a good friend and I did a short lived podcast back in 2006. We were BIG in Scandinavia. HUGE even according to our stats. Why? I had absolutely no idea. Russia even makes the list. I like Russians. I even went to visit there (this was way before the whole let&#8217;s hunt down fags and kill\/humiliate them that is going on now). I feel for my queer Russian brothers and sisters. I wish I could do something to make it all better for you. I really do. Being gay is hard enough, having to live with it in your world, I just can&#8217;t fathom it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to think it is my writing (like my forthcoming Angels of Mercy book) that keeps them coming back (because they are repeat followers &#8211; not just drive bys). But somehow I think it is the &#8220;Inspirational&#8221; gallery that keeps them coming back. Who knows. Well, really I guess I could dig deeper and find out. The analytics are there. Just not so sure if I wanna know. I don&#8217;t know why. Maybe it&#8217;s Marco and Elliot that keep them coming back. I am gonna post another chapter and this weekend I am going to put out a novella form of my forthcoming book that can be read on any e-reader (epub and kindle formats). so keep an eye out for it.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, I&#8217;ll just keep posting like I do. Just going with my gut on this. I tweet, I post on Facebook (which is where most of my links seem to come from), and I blog here.<\/p>\n<p>So, I guess I&#8217;ll give a big shout out to my followers in China!<\/p>\n<div id=\"gt-res-c\" class=\"g-unit\">\n<div id=\"gt-res-p\">\n<div id=\"gt-res-data\">\n<div id=\"gt-res-wrap\">\n<div id=\"gt-res-content\" class=\"almost_half_cell\">\n<div id=\"tts_button\"><object id=\"tts\" data=\"\/\/ssl.gstatic.com\/translate\/sound_player2.swf\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"18\" height=\"18\"><\/object><\/div>\n<h2 dir=\"ltr\"><span id=\"result_box\" class=\"short_text\" lang=\"zh-TW\"><span class=\"\">\u4f60\u597d<\/span><span class=\"\">\uff01<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>I hope I did that right. I used Google Translate so please forgive me if I said something stupid like &#8220;I will eat your dog&#8221; or something insane. I&#8217;m just trying to do my best. That wasn&#8217;t what I was trying to say at all &#8211; just wanted to say HELLO!<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m not going to go prattling on about all of this. I just thought I&#8217;d give a shout out to my followers beyond the US borders. You&#8217;re the best!<\/p>\n<p>Cheers!<\/p>\n<p>SAC<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Haze and Maze of Social Media &nbsp; Okay, I&#8217;m a techie. I mean, I work in the IT world and all of its variety of devices, servers, and networking security ins and outs. So you&#8217;d think that I&#8217;d understand how and why my website stats are what they are. But I don&#8217;t. I check [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[365,261,216,234,43,3,108,169,145,18],"tags":[68,67,375,372,373,66,312,374,376],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fanboy-moments","category-geeking-out","category-journey","category-language","category-life-inserts-itself","category-novel-writing","category-novels-vs-media","category-social-issues","category-words-have-power","category-writing","tag-angels-of-mercy","tag-elliot-donahey","tag-facebook","tag-fans","tag-followers","tag-marco-sforza","tag-social-media","tag-twitter","tag-website-stats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":879,"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions\/879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sacollins.com\/blog-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}