Astronomy Buff

50,000 People Came to My Blog Yesterday

by Tony on October 7th, 2007

And 25,000 the day before that.

They all came to read my post about my decision to homeschool my son in science this year.

It is so unsettling to have so many people respond to something I’ve written.

This is the third time something like this has happened to me. The first time was when I made the Hubble Deep Field video, the second time was when my silly coffee can post on DeepAstronomy.com made the front page of Digg.

Now this. This time it’s happening the faster and has had a larger response than the coffee can article. Most of the people this time around have come from StumbleUpon with a smaller fraction coming from Reddit and Digg.

I suppose this is why we blog, right? We want to be noticed, to create a stir, make people react.

The problem is, I feel so exposed when that happens. The distribution of responses one gets from these post runs the spectrum. This time around though, they’ve been mostly positive.

I am reminded of an essay George Orwell, one of my favorite authors of all time wrote entitled “Why I Write“. Here is why he writes:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. (Full essay)

I love the fact that he said “The desire to seem clever.” He knows the difference between a person who seems clever and one who really is. I make no claims to actually being clever, but I’m not going to argue with you if you think I am.

It’s (1) and (2) that motivate me to blog. This weekend, I experienced (1) in a big way.

Thank you all for visiting, feel free to stick around, you won’t find a more clever-seeming blog on the internets.

Technorati Tags: george orwell, why I write

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