Now Playing: Trying to reach a broader audience with your opinion.
Topic: Online Publishing
Roadbed's comment confirmed for me what has come to be my "pre-prejudice" that always tempts me to avoid posting on Kos.
I learned more than a year ago that the bread you cast on Kos waters most likely will be tossed back on your shore within minutes of posting because of the sheer volume of posts. To see my post's life span for possibly at least an hour, I max out the view to the "50 most recent posts."
What has really caused me to keep my Kos account active with occasional posts is the spur-of-the moment impulse wherein I'm so invested in something I've written that in my desire for a possible wider venue of exposure I forget the reality of posting at Kos.
In addition, knowing the volume of comments, I'm also aware that many Kos personalities seem always to be conscious of the "free-admittance" opportunity to what all bloggers realize is a national stage or platform.
In a relatable way, I suppose that the most active and consistent Kos bloggers have in mind the kind of success represented at Kos by someone they know or have met - in my case - McJoan.
Perhaps a reminder of inadequate writing skill, My own blog now 10 months old still has less than 20,000 hits and publishes in a rural Washington coastal county of less than 20,000 souls. Here at Kos, apparently like many Kos writers, I tend to be overly self-aware and will post for my own internally visualized national audience or peer group rather than for current Kos readers or authors.
Regardless, amateur writers like me who post diaries in which we are invested in specific points or objectives find it frustrating when most of the comments tend to consist of some sort of logic/factual clarification writing - the kind I imagine I'd find in a debate around a table at a symposium of intellectuals.
Since I'm personally invested and aroused in something I consider urgent, comments like Roadbed's feel like they're written by bystanders at a fire who are ignoring the flames while arguing about the proper technique for connecting the fire hose to the hydrant.
Having made that kind of analogy, I have to insist that I'm not trying to diss Roadbed, whose comment was helpful, clarifying and appreciated. However, regarding my post about depleted uranium, Roadbed seemed to infer that if total accuracy about DU is lacking, my post "deteriorates" to a critique of "warfare" in general. Since we live in a country formed by war, there is nothing unusual about that.
... which then feels to me like a suggestion that my primary message and questions are irrelevant because the definition of what I used as the writer's "hook" is debatable. Hence my ego-driven ballon once again is punctured and I can crawl under the bed in angry self-pity.
Yeah right. That is not what the blogging experience does to writers unless they are too too sensitive to disagreement and unwilling to take criticism or instruction.
Employed full time and over the hill in my sixties, I'm still too busy to spend leisure time writing stuff in a style meant to attract purely pedantic responses. My most successful KOS posts are very VERY few and seemed in those moments to have really rung lots of bells. Best for me was 08/2005, after which I of course had been injected with an addictive drug of wanting to do it again.
So I too am conscious of being potentially a guest speaker on a massive national platform - and like the rest, I consciously swing for the fences with my posting.
99% of the time I immediately miss the updraft and quickly fall back to the ground.
I pick myself up, shake off the dust, the pebbles and the leaves ... and immediately spy that damn keyboard ... calling ... like Homeric sirens.
Someone please tie me to the mast and cover my eyes!
