Major recon and salvage started on that this last weekend. That forum was rescued by fans when the original Lexx.com sold off. I sat in on that auction, it sold for $8000 something. This is what that domain is worth now, according to GoDaddy. Which is sad because the pointer is being completely wasted.
That got me curious about my own dotcoms. What is Lexxperience worth? Well, it depends on who you check with. GoDaddy says this.
GoDaddy says they're nuts. Pinky blog is cool, like the Fonz.
So what about my Janika dotcom? It just sits there, right. I mean, I never do anything with it, it's just a place holder for later, blahblah. *FALLS OUT OF CHAIR* I had popped over to freevaluator to see how that looks. Surely that can't be right.
Valuemydomain said that was a pile of crap but I still kinda stared at that again.
And then statchest just blew me completely away. HOW???
So depending on where you check, Lexxperience isn't doing too bad, and JanikaBanks is kinda hot. I wanted to keep checking but most of those sites stop you at 3 and then require either a login or buying premium to see more. Guess I'd better get on the new analytics property settings. Pretty sure setting all those as verified properties with google IDs is what made them worth anything, and I'm guessing WordPress is what made Janika more valuable. Funny that Blogger isn't more valuable... lol. I should move all my Lexx stuff to WordPress just in case something really big changes.
Always something. I really do need office staff.
Quietly not pointing straight out that I'm worth more than Lexx....
My klout score literally nosedived on the 22nd and is now the lowest it's been in ages. I know exactly why, too. I say that like it was huge, basically went from 60 to 58 after months of coasting. It was almost like I found my true negative factor, plugged it in and repelled people, and it all pointed to youtube. My Webmii score reflected that, too, although it's really interesting that the score goes up if my web presence search parameters are international, and then it has nothing to do with klout's final say. But basically, I diverted from my usual entertainment distractions, and I'll be honest, I didn't like myself doing that, either.
I hadn't checked impressions from keywords in awhile. I've been wondering what is the weirdest search parameters my blog has been lumped into, so I'm throwing darts at 141 pages of keyword searches and stopped in my tracks at something in Russian that translates to "riyet duck buy in kiev". Really, guys? Oh, yeah, my about page has a Darkwing Duck motif. But then another Russian search phrase translated to "amazing lightness", so I guess I have seriously breached Google around the globe. I seem to get a lot of Korean search referrals outside of my GWT list, and at least 7 different languages are represented in my top ten all time visitors. Top referring site is google.com, top referring URL is facebook.com. Basically, google pushes me out there, and facebook pulls people inward. I get instant hits from at least 4 different countries within seconds of sharing links to facebook, and another 2-3 countries within 5 minutes of sharing to twitter, depending on how I set up the tweet with hashtags and graphics cards. Internal tags and keywords do that rest. Statcounter says Pinky blog has been visited by 91 countries. I never dreamed this one would pull in traffic at all. I mean, it's not crazy or anything, but it's interesting watching where those hits come from around the world, because it's a difficult and therefore meaningful search.
But apparently more importantly, I come up on Google's 4th page for "allergic to ragweed", which is pretty outstanding, given how vague that is, 5th page for "desperate popstars", which is actually a little scary, and page ONE for "flowers for algernon book", like literally no one else talks about it or something, I dunno. Actually, I come up on page one for nearly 2 1/2 statcounter pages of google search phrases. "blue halloween" is my golden ticket with the most impressions (hundreds), "dr. evil leo" a close second, then "spock handshake", "rick lagina images", and "bird splat". Sorry, Benedict. *crickets* (Bird splat???) (I'm on a top ten google search for BIRD SPLAT.) (Sorry, that's just not sinking in.)
Sometimes I get these weird thoughts, like how I'm trying to fit in a causative universe, and then I wonder how in the world I even got that idea, like what does that even mean when I can't even imagine a noncausative universe. Rhyme and reason, me pushing google around and it pushing back. It wants to rate content, I litter content for it to rate. My existence is measured and found wanting during a fail week, and being human is rewarded with being quickly forgotten in a machinistic inclined society. To step beyond a tree falling in the woods, this brownie literally doesn't exist unless I talk about it somewhere. I'm eating a brownie. Now it can exist.
Probably the singlemost influencing fanvid of my entire blogging life.
I've been off and on this post for 3 days, so if you think you can handle all this, grab a sandwich and kick back.
When a 3 year old says it's time to clean the floors, it'stimetocleanthefloors. And no holding back, very disgusted *ew* kind of thing- Meemaw, you need to clean the floor! and then dancing off sprinkling more sticky around like sticky pixie dust.
So yeah, filled up the ol' steam mop Sunday while they were off visiting friends, dropped the reservoir on the floor hole side down, cleaned it up with a used towel, and @bonenado breezed through saying Good job, way to mop! 👍 #achievementunlocked I'm calling it a presoak. It werked.
Hello mildew, my old friend.
I've come to scrub you off again
Because the surfaces that you're darkling
I think it's time to make them resparkling
And it's gross how you're coating up the drain
You can't remain
Time to go down and perish.
I could make that 4 verses longer like the song, but I'm really not that into mildew hate. I mean, I don't tolerate it, yeah, and sometimes it sucks that I live in a state that strongly promotes its flourishing growth and it gags me to see it, so I'm usually all over it before it even shows up, but I could be doing something else like folding laundry.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I love how kids are so innocent of seeing the bigger picture for awhile.
Poor mama can't see at all.
There we go, that works.
Boops are awesome. That is all.
Flying casual, like you do... Luke: Vader's on that ship. Han Solo: Now don't get jittery, Luke. There are a lot of command ships. Keep your distance, though, Chewie, but don't *look* like you're trying to keeping your distance.
[Chewie barks a question] Han Solo: *I* don't know. Fly casual.
--quote source--
I proudly admit that I gave birth to this person. I will always love this face, and this is my fave pic ever.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The amazing leftover waste of oak tree sex. I'm so glad humans don't do this.
While so far I'm doing uber fantastic during peak tree pollen (compared to years past), it's not taking much to trigger histamine overloads. One day I saw my psychologist (how many people hang out on that beautiful fabric covered couch?) and ran through Walmart (I seriously actually get facial swelling in Walmart during high histamine seasons even without touching my face, and spring sunshine only exacerbates it because I get photophobic- polymorphic light eruption- when I'm in histamine overload) and spent the rest of the day tanked on enough benadryl to take a horse down, but I was just fine. One way I know I'm dealing with a reaction is when benadryl doesn't make me sleepy. My body gets so wired reacting that I can take benadryl all day long and never keel over into a nap. I have a great fight or flight response, good thing I'm not a meta (from comics for people who don't know what that is) or I'd probably be a ticking time bomb.
It's still beautiful.
So far this month I've had moderate reactions to salmon and corn on the cob on two different weeks, so naturally I'm all over looking up lists of high histamine foods to avoid, like All About Histamines. I spent so many years in my past with doctors saying IBS and anxiety- that has all melted away since I changed what I eat and started noticing that pollen seasons and hormones tend to kick up the systemic response to foods I normally eat just fine. I didn't start learning this until I went anaphylactic on several food groups over 3 years, notably nuts and peanuts (cashews was my first biggie), citrus (I lament the loss to this day), and wheat (the worst ever, 17 days on prednisone but boy did my life change after I purged it out of my house). I stopped eating fish and seafood until that all calmed down, about 3 years. I had to purge all my herbal teas (surprise! yes, you can have allergic reactions to chamomile) and stopped eating tomato salsas and sauces (I'm not even allergic to tomatoes, but they are a super trigger for kicking the rest up a notch), and the only chocolate I'll touch at all is Hershey's cocoa and Hershey's milk chocolate chips. I've been very fortunate that I can still tolerate dairy and eggs, but I'm learning not to overdo them during spiky histamine months.
Our first Japanese iris bloom.
The regular irises are about to pop, too.
In the interim, 'little' things I've lived with for a long time have been magically healing unawares. A CT of my abdomen for something else entirely (thankfully negative) remarked that a significant years-long spot on my liver could no longer be seen, so technically I probably can no longer say I have NASH. A treadmill stress test in the last 5 years placed me about 20 years younger than I really am, which is really significant with my kind of health history. On top of that, my lungs are scarred up from a soil based fungal infection and even though I lived on daily steroid inhaler for 9 months just to breathe one year when I was at my sickest point, a pulmonologist was unable to trigger an asthma attack during testing. I'm still at risk for COPD as I age (only smoked a year and a half, go figure), but aside from airway reactions during higher histamine seasons, I have beautifully clear lungs and easy breathing the last few years, and I think I use an inhaler maybe once a year now. I keep one on me anyway in my epipurse for emergencies, but I love not having to use it.
On the outer cusp of Mirkwood.
I changed my diet and morphed over the last 6 years into the healthiest I've been in my adult life, like aging backward. I still get tired easily, and I'm getting stiffer and have to keep after mobility and core strength to stay on top of normal wear and tear during aging, but at least I'm able to take care of myself around my own house. I've been through a couple of years of needing help putting on shoes and socks, not being able to drive, etc. I run into forum posts where patients say they'd rather die slow painful deaths than be compliant with whatever, and being someone coming back from the brink of slow, painful death, I just laugh and say Ok, be an idiot, but stop complaining about it. Years ago I asked a woman I know who was terribly ill all the time if she would give up her Pepsi if she knew it would add 10 years to her life, and she actually laughed and told me to my real face (not on internet or phone) that she would die before she gave up her Pepsi. Well... I'm still here. I gave up all soda pop and a whole lot more. I'm still here being good for people, not dragging their lives down.
And that's the thing, isn't it? The conundrum of becoming drags on our families, on society, on the economy, and the horrible depression of needing support networks and compassion. If we are sick and we know that we are doing it to ourselves, how much compassion can we expect? Let's do a thought experiment just for fun. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists contend that Mormonism is a branch of Illuminati or Trilateral control, basically one of the many parts of the New World Order mobilization and execution strategy. (I'm not saying that's what's going on, but if it is, then I personally think Glenn Beck is a strategically placed doublethink cover, like many others in religion, politics, and journalism.) Mormons are encouraged to follow health guidelines, as do some other religions. Entire religions recognize how foods and substances affect their populations, and those religions are part of world control, ergo perhaps that is how the new world order is 'weeding out' the sick from the healthy and rebuilding the future. And if that is the case and you are falling for the products that spin you into a pharmaceutical loop, joke's on you, isn't it? Because it's all out there, whether it's conspiracy or not, the FACT that these things make us sick and that big corp and big pharma are living large on you being stupid enough to say you'd rather die than give up what's killing you.
Bluejacky is butting in saying we always thought humans were stupid anyway, but Pinky is reminding us that we like humans after all, and kind of feel sorry for them being so dumb. It's not always their own faults, and addictions and lifestyles really are super hard to change, as we know from personal experience. So who are we to judge? We are here to say there really is light on the other end of the long dark tunnel of suffering, there really is relief from depression and sadness, and it's worth all the work while you're feeling hopeless to finally arrive there and see it for real. I know many of us feel trapped in our bodies, in our jobs, in our lives, and on this planet, but we are more powerful than we can imagine, and every day the tiny changes we make add up to great big changes over time. You can do this.
~~~~~~~~~~~
I've never messed with site maps. Google has been trying to tell me for months that Pinky blog is too big to crawl now. I can see them still crawling my other blogs I that barely touch (pourquoi?), but not Pinky blog. Am I worried at all?
No, I'm not worried, and I'll tell you why. Webmii ranked me up from 4.4 to 5.6 just over the last 6-8 months I think, statcounter is telling me incoming from facebook far outstrips G+ and twitter referrals (and much of the FB traffic is from outside my network, I know where all my people are), and as rarely as I use wordpress, new material from both my own blogs and Autisable show up pretty immediately in my name search in a Google search bar, so I feel like site mapping Pinky blog wouldn't be terribly different from Mantrid collapsing a universe. It IS too big, and I don't want to pull a ton of crawlers in all of a sudden and upset whatever balance keeps the internet from spiraling into a black hole.
Speaking of Mantrid... Yes, epic fail getting that done. Again. Yes, my house flipped over like a pancake nearly right on top of me taking finishing that work seriously. Again. Which basically means that my method and plan wildly skewed into an alt world kind of daily rescheduling (since when has this ever not happened?), but I do have more written out, a few more screen shots, etc. And today, as I'm adapting to this new lifestyle and time zone (I've adapted my sleep schedule by several hours), my brain was so on heading out the door that all kinds of motivation and ideas were sorting themselves out as I drove around, but an hour later, even with extra antihistamines, that was just gone and a sinus pressure headache was in its place. Still, I'm thrilled that I'm over 2/3 through April and have yet to break out an inhaler, and how I'm this far in without prednisone is amazing. Last year I made it pretty much all the way through, but was extremely miserable and hiding in my house. This year I'm juggling my stuff and actually breathing easily, worst of it is my eyes, lotta ducking my head in stabby sunlight and morphing into lizard eyeballs kind of stuff, but that beats oozy eyes and ear infections. And anyway, me talking about real life stuff does this in search engines, so I really don't see the point of wasting a day or two on site mapping.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So here I am, my first April since I pieced together all the things and crossed the threshold of that doorway I waited so long to walk through. April will always be my month of mourning. I'll always carry shattered moments frozen in time, and I'll always feel them pierce me like broken glass in every April to come. The only difference now is that I'm aware that I'm doing this, and that this is what affects everything else I do and say to people all around me, hiding that I'm bleeding internally while the shards shred my heart all over again. I really don't think I need to talk about it any more, at least not here.
But there is a reason I brought it up. #transparency I was talking to my psychologist about how a person like me and where I come from can reach a place where I'm defending my decision to publicly support a faux snuff film producer because I want the world to really see what some of us live through, live with. I want the world to see and feel what my best friend went through being stabbed to death multiple times during her brutal rape. I want people reeling away in shock from truth, from the horrors of real, and start looking more intently at each other, at the people all around us, to really see each other, noticing those of us who've touched the darkness, escaped it, slipped through it, been part of it. Those of us who talk in code keep low profiles, braced against the sadness of stepping up into public knowing we won't have the support of our families and many of our friends while we reach out to others trying to make it through the dark, others feeling alone and lost with no one to talk to or understand.
And then the weird cognitive leap from walking out of that appointment to driving over to a library to pick up some more books for a 3 year old, that strange step back out into the kind of bright daylight that hides the pain this planet is in.
Twitter can't fix this, although it's a good start. I know it looks like I left twitter. I still see you guys, and I'm still checking in. My rock is my twitter gang.
While I was driving around, another opening sentence for another story popped into my mind, titled 500M. "There was a time when there were over 6 billion of us..." The rumors about population planning and culling might be history some day. What would conspiracy theories turn into looking back? They would become legends, myths. Just stories. So many stories in my head. Will I ever get them written down and shared? They feel important. I love writing. What is stopping all this? Besides pain and pain and pain and pain, in my body, in my heart, in the people all around me, in the world.
Pinky blog is growing into something I never dreamed. I stepped back out so timidly, and over time have slowly removed layers and layers in public view until I'm no longer timid. I may not be a youtube vlogger or a contending reviewer or a special interests networker, but I'm the center of a universe with many things in it, and all these things are part of me, and all these things must come together soon and become a New Thing.
And I laugh- How in the world is that even possible if I can't even finish writing a TV series character review? And I laugh back- We never thought it would be possible to make it through April this well, either. Touché.
I'm one of those who quietly shakes my head when other people feel a surge of exuberance and blurt things like "I'm in the mood to build something, somebody give me a suggestion for what to build next!" (minecraft), "I feel like writing, someone give me a writing prompt!" (blogs), "I'm in the mood to bake, someone tell me what I should cook!" (foodies), "Let's go shopping! Give me ideas what to look for." (burning pockets), "I'm in the mood to make a garden, what kind of flowers should I buy?" (gardeners), you get the picture. Across all the hobbies, I see people asking for ideas for their next deck or flea market project, their next detailing venture, their next quilt or crochet, even their next pet and sometimes even their next child.
Pinky doesn't ask other people what Pinky should do next. Neither do the rest of us. Bluejacky says "I am the cat who walks by himself, and all other places are alike to me." (Kipling) We all know she's bluffing and that's really a coping strategy, but not a very good one because it's emotionally sterile. However, it's the opposite of emotionally codependent and dysfunctional, so that worked well for awhile.
Anyways, I've been wondering off and on about starting a new Pinky blog because this one is so excessively huge that even google won't touch it with a stick any more (at least not for free) and the bots be swarming now. I have apps and crawlers in several countries to thank for roughly 15% of my traffic, which is actually exceptional because I've been such a bio nazi. Check my latest webmii report from this week. (@LisaMarieBowman has me beat, but just barely. 😁) This is the most important part of the internet. If you need some kind of context, check out Ellen Dubin's Webmii. These are the 2 women I like holding up as a sort of goal to reach myself. (There are more, of course, I keep a list.)
But this is what it's all about in a nutshell. It's really important for a NAME to stand out and grab all the correct data into one curator. Lexx fans from the old days will probably do a double take here. I know, right? I never meant for this to happen, it just did. All I had to do was make sure I linked properly, like we were all told to do years ago. Srsly, all I had to do.
And that is leading (in a real time pop up kind of way, because this comes and goes depending on how actively I'm linking my Lexx stuff) to a grave but quite hilarious misunderstanding. The only 'related' person in this entire data collection (at this current info gathering) is someone I've been very careful to step further away from. That goes to a Webmii report for Michael which turns out is a composite of a number of Michaels with the same name, a completely not Michael's klout score and the wrong linkedin, and as you can see, there are a variety of Michaels flourishing in corporate America. The Anthony Ellis part is cool, he's my top retweeter.
My visibility doesn't rely on Pinky blog, obviously, although I've played google search to associate just about anything and everything with my name in media searches. This is spot on, though. This is web presence. I don't need a wiki page or an IMDB profile or a syndication host to create my own presence. I pretty much stick out like a sore thumb. All of this was planned. I've worked hard for this, and right now I'm coasting on a gap month hoping I don't lose it.
So the question comes up in my mind- Should I start a new Pinky blog? And when I think of even asking I feel like I should know the answer. I migrated once because of a server move, and I'm doing very well on blogger. I can live with the swarms and I feel like everything here is archived well. The only problem is what I call 'excessive baggage' alerts. Google is kind of insisting that I do something about all this and I'm thinking that's an 'excessive work' issue that I'm most likely not going to deal with. Spending time keeping blog maintenance up shaves time off other things. I enjoy blogging very much and will continue indefinitely. But I keep bringing up something about a book... (or two, or...)
clicks back to Lexx fandom source site
Also, I'm busy. It's about time to grab my lapels and fling myself against a wall again.
I may be getting a custom built Lamborghini for Christmas- MSI GE Series, 12-16 GB DDR3, Intel i7 processor, 256 GB SSD, 1TB HDD, dedicated Nvidia video card... It'll probably be something close to this. Won't be getting it from Best Buy, though.
I neither asked for it nor was expecting it. I think @bonenado just knows I'm doing with lappy what I did with my old phone, running it down until there is just nothing left. This will probably be my MOD for awhile after the holidays. (method of destruction)
I'm also not very adaptable to change and tend to go gloriously down with my ship. This is me and lappy crashing soon irl.
Oh, by the way, I made @bonenado chief admin over my tech staff now. I have staff!!!!
Speaking of adaptable, Ellen Dubinlightly cajoled me for not being all over a Lexx instagram. Ok, I'm sure she had no idea that even pointing something out to aspienado is a full-on challenge. Of course "Lexx" and even "Lexxperience" were taken (THAT is why I didn't go there, I was kinda ticked about that when I found it awhile back) (I take things personally that have nothing to do with me) (that's what evil villains DO), and I had made a lame generic account instead to follow a couple people and then never use again. So ok, dragged my butt back over there, used my NAME, and now I've got an instagram account linked to my Lexxperience facebook page. And I'm following Ellen Dubin on instragram, go do that right now, guys.
I'll be truthful, I find instagram clumsy for the kind of work I do. If I ever wind up on a convention floor again, sure, fine, I'll fill instagram up right and left, but I'm already paying for premium photobucket and self hosting probably over ten thousand pix across the webs by now. I'm not paying for instagram. Well, yet. If I can pay for Jib-Jab, favstar, paper.li, littlelexx.net, statcounter, and several of my own blogs and domains, yeah, I'll probably wind up paying for instagram. But not yet.
By the way, this is not me. Other people use the Lexxperience handle as a monicker. I don't. All my Lexxperience stuff is out in the open and linked and utterly consumed with Lexx. My monickers are Pinky, Janika, and in the past were Bluejacky or Yablo. I don't toy around with my passions and leave them dangling like that person did in that forum.
ONE person caught this retweet and said it looked like fossilized dead Lexx. Brava.
:edit: Some content removed due to conflict of interest. 3-27-16
I realized again last night I really do need a professional handler to help me interface. I think more people realize stuff than I do, takes Pinky Robot so long to process, the real time stuff gets pretty overwhelming. But now I need to gather myself and GET TO WORK! >=lFOCUS!!!
I'm feeling excessively super focused this morning, what can I say. Wait, that vid was NSFW. Hang on. Rats, I'm veering off, little too intense. Gritting my teeth, steeling my will. I've gotta go back to some solid standbys.
Someone on a FB Xanga group was whining again, so I kerplunked my page rating down in an 'ok, let's all quit whining now' kind of way. Really getting sick of whiners. If you're still whining about a blog move two years later in a fully supported group, your blog host must not be all that bad, sheesh.
Anyway, saved it for posterity. The worth has come down a smidge (about $3000) but I haven't been posting anything, either. By the way, yes, I was actually asked if I'd consider ad placement. I've gotten lots of spam in my life, but this was legitimate email from a real guy. If I got picked up during scouting for ad placement, my site is a power player. If I were *cough*smart*cough I'd probably jump on stuff like this, but I'm an arrogant loser who has other plans.
From trash in space. "In every game there must be a winner and a loser. In this game, you will be the loser."
Ok, back to now again. On to the important stuff. My first pair of bigfoot sox. I needed something special after the big nerve assessment (my arms ached pretty good the rest of the day +_+).
And I bought this hideous outfit full price and not even on sale (@bonenado's gonna croak) because it was hideously AWESOME. I'll probably never wear the whole outfit together, just the blouse with jeans and the pants with a solid top. Those pants would be awesome if I ever wind up in hospital for anything, super comfy and still actual dressy pants, not sweats. By the way, I discovered that I've dropped a pants size. I'm so frugal clothes shopping that I don't notice these things.
I am so jealous of little girls nowadays.
Ha, @bonenado is so busy being all excited over whether he's going fishing or bow hunting tomorrow that he never even glanced at that outfit.
Tonight is filet mignon, baked tatos, and big fancy salad out of a bag, because that's super easy and feedin up the mighty hunter for a big weekend. Heard Bunny is puny (102 fever) so probably won't see her this weekend. Tonight is the last Continuum, you all know my thoughts on that by now. If you don't see me on the webs tonight, my hands still ache and it's painful to hold my phone, sorry.
I've lightly mocked Sumall and other analytics in the past, including pinterest business analytics, google analytics (I was a beta tester), youtube, and even compared notes between my own blogs' different traffic counters in the past. Stats are like a train counting passion with me. I took stats courses in college through three different fields, the most rigorous being sociology, and there are oh so many ways that stats can be misleading.
When we say "impression", we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. Not everyone who receives a tweet will read it, so you should consider this a measure of potential impressions. Both reach and impressions should be treated as directional metrics to give you an idea of the overall exposure the tracked term received. Use these metrics to get a sense of the size of yourpotential audience, and use engagement metrics like retweets, clicks and replies to gain a more complete understanding of your impact. You know the junk mail you get in your mailbox at home? And the junk email you get? Impressions are how many times your tweet or post or pin or youtube has been delivered to a feed, including list feeds and hashtag feeds. Impressions have nothing to do with people actually seeing your tweet (or pin or blog post in a search or youtube), especially when you think about all the junk or bot or dead accounts that follow you. Still, it's fun to think the possibility is there. In fact, the more popular the hashtags or tag words or links you make in the text, the more often what you posted gets picked up by bots for impressions. How you hook the bots is key to putting yourself 'out there' for the possibility of being seen more. THAT is why impressions analytics are useful, you can use them to gauge how well you are being picked up and distributed.
Let's play with this a little bit. According to twitter analytics, these (below) are the top tweets in each of these months. Keep in mind what I said about impressions. For instance, this first one was retweeted by one of the top NFL parody accounts, and even though it wasn't shared or responded to very much at all, it was distributed from that retweet through a whole slew of feeds I generally don't have access to. Even then, it didn't get anywhere near my favstar top tweets. Favstar is a much more reliable source for actual performance, and I even pay for pro because I find it so useful. But back to mocking twitter analytics.
Nov 2014
This was the week Leonard Nimoy died, and this probably remained much more private in a single list feed of friends than nearly 7000 people actually seeing it. You can see I didn't hashtag or even mention his name, but being convo-linked, it must have gotten caught up in the flurry of redistribution just by association. This is where I question how 'real' impressions are, even for feed distribution.
Feb 2015
The Walking Dead hashtag is pretty good for being flung by bots into more feeds, but that show is so saturated with a plethora of delightfully creative hashtags already that this hardly means a thing.
March 2015
Check these next two tweets, which were obviously actually seen by more people because they got more real response, thanks to Mr. Potts retweeting them. Andrew Lee Potts gives good tweet if you're cool about promoting his stuff.
April 2015
May 2015
This is a surprise. We've barely started June and already I've got this nice reach/response combo, so the impressions might actually mean something here. See the hashtags? MondayBlogs is a big deal and I've gotten some sweet traffic out of it in the past. Still, actual hits on that post at this very point in time is only 67, so I can clearly see that impressions do NOT mean much when it comes to actual link clicking. This is why I mock impressions being a thing. Yes, they are useful for gauging how I'm putting myself out, but they're useless for just about everything else.
June 2015 (so far)
Let's switch gears now. If that weren't enough, there's also such a thing as top media tweet, media meaning graphics of any kind, like pictures, videos, vines, etc., basically a tweet with an attachment. These are big deals because when they go viral the numbers go crazy. I've never reached a crazy point, but I admire some who have, although it's difficult to admire users who have figured out how to swipe the responses by coopting with the 'quote' option, which knocks you into the 'mentions' category of analytics. Since places like Ana Tweets don't count being quoted in their top mentions, your best actual response can still be completely missed or glossed over, so there is a bit of outcry about quoting being a form of cheating in order to steal response off other people's tweets. I actually view being quoted and my response being 'stolen' as a compliment, it means my tweets are worth something to other people. You won't see that in analytics.
But back to twitter analytics. Top media tweets are useful for perking up your timeline. If you're depressed about having a slow response day (because you're a real person and don't buy followers or have a ton of bots following you), just toss out a couple of cute pix and voila, someone retweets or likes, so you know your feed hasn't turned your entire reader base into zombies. Want to see what your readers respond to? Media tweets are a quick and fun way to experiment.
This one really was an experiment, everything about this tweet is so rare that pretty much the only way it got noticed was by fans who look for these things and this actor in particular.
Nov 2014
This is my most 'impressive' I think (ha, pun), because without a single hashtag I got this many impressions from a group of people who use a list feed to stay in touch. This speaks volumes for that list feed distribution.
Feb 2015
It helps to be live tweeting with a television show if you're looking for a way to be seen by more actual real users as opposed to twitter bots. Reading live hashtag feeds are the new 'reality show' of the internet.
March 2015
Tagging relevant accounts (we all hope for retweets) when we promote others usually helps jack the numbers a little, and always try to squeeze a hashtag in there somewhere. Being more specific would have been better, but I ran out of room. The #scifi hashtag is so vague that I'm sure this tweet was buried very quickly in that hashtag feed. I think I pushed the same media/link later with hashtags like #spaceship, but this one got top tweet since it was retweeted by the show creators and one of the actors.
April 2015
See what I mean, rev up a slow day with an oldie but a goodie.
May 2015
We've all seen people who get tons of retweets every day, and we wonder how that's happening, since they don't seem to be doing anything else but tweeting. Some get lucky, but a lot of it is either about turning networking into a game, or paying money for upgrades, promos, and followers. My twitter account is 'organic', meaning that most of my followers are real people (even the parody accounts) and I don't play the follow back game. I grew my twitter from scratch mostly on my own work and I really don't care about numbers. If I did I'd have over 4000 followers by now, but I keep banishing and purging.
Numbers are fun, but as I keep asking, do they really mean anything? Some of my best days have the lowest numbers attached to them. Why do I call them my best days? Because an actor or film maker or private club might have DMd or PMd me. Because I might've had a really cool private convo with someone. Because I might have noticed half the world hit a particular blog one day out of the blue and realized someone linked me somewhere, which is a nice compliment. Because I might've discovered someone hacked one of my youtube chicken videos into an Asian porn site and laughed my head off. Because I might have accidentally run into someone saying really cool stuff about something of mine that they took the time to translate into another language.
Slow days are good days. I don't have to see what's happening in analytics to know how I'm doing. It's fun, yes. It's good brain exercise to think about strategy, and good practice doing experiments, but don't let analytics be your 'report card'. What an auto-bot algorithm might tell you is your best work might actually be about the stupidest waste of time you ever did, and it's easy to feel disappointed that something we thought was more important didn't even make the bottom of a count list. Don't fall for that.
I see tons of advice floating around on how to build your media presence, blah blah blah, but in my experience, all you have to do is create a unique name or phrase and then attach it to hashtags, pictures, and links of all kinds, and then you pop up in all kinds of searches. Sheer numbers that never get measured are how many times pictures in search engines will click to something you created. The easiest way to get noticed is with variety. Tweeting or blogging the same thing over and over doesn't build web presence.
I'm afraid there are only two ways to get big numbers- with big money or big work, which includes persistence. They say do what you love, right? If you don't love doing what it takes to get the numbers, why are you worried about the numbers? Actors work very hard to get where they are. Film crews work very hard and sometimes dig deep into their own pockets to get where they are. It's not magic. You want to be a success? Either shell out the dough or work hard. Preferably both.
