Choose the reason you want for running a blog (narcissism, financial gain, frightening right-wing political views etc etc), but one of the challenges is drawing readers to the site to see what you have to say.

Obviously the best way is to create compelling content which will make people want to visit (yeah yeah, I’m having some difficulties with that). However, many sites generate very little original content on their own, relying instead on automated feed aggregators and other robots to collect content and links from other sites.

I’m fine with that: a lot of people can’t or won’t write and there are obviously people who like to just visit one URL to see everything that’s available on specific topics. Besides, automated link inclusion and trackbacks obviously drive traffic to me: I like to think that on occassion, someone who lands here by chance will want to come back of his/her own volition for the snappy hip stuff I post (it could happen).

The problem with automating collection is that if the selected keywords are too general and there’s no subsequent triage of what’s collected, it can very quickly p*ss off the audience the blogsite is trying to cater to. Case in point: what I wrote on hot monkey love.

Those of you who did read it can probably tell that it’s an attempt to get cheap laughs you to learn something new, specifically the importance of chemical signaling via scent and its role in intra- and interspecies recognition. However, there is apparently enough in there that it warranted inclusion by the aggregator from a site catering to those who count um… “auto-stimulation” as a hobby.

Oops. Not my fault (or intention) but I’m pretty sure that fruitflies kinda kill the mood.

The “WTF? cake” photo courtesy SanFranAnnie on Flickr and is used under a Creative Commons license. It certainly lives up as an homage to WTF? as it’s apparently a vegan cake that uses cream in the frosting (free the cows!)

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