Great interview!
I liked this "I'm very proud of the work and care that I put into my blog, so it seems odd to me that I'm not bigger than bOINGbOING yet."

This impact bOINGbOING has is a little odd to me too.
Your blog is of course much better and more original.

What makes bOINGbOING good is the 100 thousands of readers and their feedback to the entries.

So what you need is more readers.

But.. on the other hand.. many readers also means endless hours in the in-box.

As the popularity of my own blog grew the work "behind" the blog accelerated. Now, I have to communicate on a daily basis with readers.

Creating a blog and doing a good job takes time. You are obviously doing IT.

But being popular is maybe not always something to strive for.
I must admit that my own blog was better a year ago. At that time i just blogged, had fun without any responsabilities.
Now, at some times, I feel trapped (if you know what I mean..?).

Thanks, Sebastian. Your support has always been very much appreciated.

I definitely would like to have more readers, but I need a lot more referrals than I've been getting lately for that to happen. When I have been linked to high-traffic sites, I don't get many return visitors, so getting 7,000 hits/day from BB or Metafilter is nice, but it doesn't mean that much in the long run if those people never come back.

I have felt a bit trapped, not because of success, but because I always feel like I'm right on the verge of breaking through, but never seem to make it. I'm not sure what, if anything, I can do to get this blog up to a higher level of readership without changing the Goof into something I don't like.

Exactly.

And - another thing - did you lose many visitors when you moved to the new url?

My guess is you did. So you need to be patient.

Fame is around the corner.

I actually got a lot more page hits after I moved, but I think it was because Dreamhost provides better logging software than what I was using before.

But I did seem to lose a lot of my Bloglines subscribers. I put out RSS-only posts on my old site to let them know that I moved, but most of them didn't bother to re-subscribe.

The problem with people like 'us' is that we are simply not mainstream, nor do we have breasts or cool software to download.

All these networks and google hits are worth noting. Most of the time the result (or better say link to your blog) is not relevant for the searcher - or like you said 'most of them don't come back'.

So my suggestion: get yourself a cool tranny outfit and become the Elvira of Tiki, offer free naked pics every day and write more postings like 'suck like a zombie'. ;-)

I've got Tranniehunes, do they count?

An interesting interview, and one I was hoping Bella would get around to. I was particularly interested in your online past. I didn't know you used to review cult movies!

When I was a link blogger I used to pressure myself to make daily posts as not to lose readers or my blog rating. It seems silly to me now.

Now I am happy with the handful of regular readers that I can interact with more personally. It's much more satisfying than a high "Unique Visitor" count.

It's gratifying to reach a large audience, but there is something to be said for staying out of the mainstream, too.

Mark, I used to hang out in alt.cult-movies and posted several reviews there under my real name. If you're interested in reading them, drop me a private e-mail. They aren't all that great though.

I thought Bella's interview with you was quite interesting as well. I had no idea your wife got dooced by her employers, and for such innocent comments. That's incredibly sucky.

I really don't feel pressured to post every day, although I usually do when I'm not traveling, because I do a lot of websurfing and find more things that I want to post about.

I'm not interested in generating a high hit count for its own sake either, never have been. Like I said, it doesn't mean much if nobody ever comes back after that first visit. Even if I never got another page hit after tonight, I think that it's been worth it simply because of all the cool people I've met, and old friends and parts of my almost-forgotten past that I've reconnected with.

Good stuff. I find the interviewing of bloggers to be both fascinating and a great service. As lawless and open as the form is few of us ever "spill the beans" in such a straightforward way. It's an excuse to speak without feeling like a self-obsessed confessional twat for the blogger and a chance for the reader to leap-frog the digital divide and come just a bit closer to "knowing."

I had to laugh when you said " I always feel like I'm right on the verge of breaking through" in your reply to Sebastian's first comment. I always feel the opposite, that I'm right on the verge of breaking down. Seems that having the breakthrough moment just up ahead is a good place to be.

As for traffic and popularity etc, I think the compulsion to rise in the ranks, is a transference of our worldly reward systems. For most of us blogging offers no concrete reward for the work put in. All we can hope to win are comments, linkage, and rank, and that's just what we crave, even though at the end of the day these do not change a single thing. We are still hurling our efforts into a shifting and bottomless abstraction.

I think that for many of us, "success" in the terms which we seek it would only speed our departure from the scene. We'd quickly see that being at the top of our piles changed precious little about the experience accept growing the digit length on our hosting bills. Point being the promise of an illusory reward is better balm (and a better motivator)than the realization of that reward's flimsiness.

To Sebastian's point at the beginning, it's a bit like being promoted in a job without an increase. You're glad to be "appreciated" but the promotion simply means you must do more for more of the same.

Maybe we should all be glad for our "middle of the pack" status? I mean I have too little "free time" as it is!

Anyhow thanks for the fine interview MrB. And of course thanks for the mention, the burst of serotonin at noticing it felt very good here inside the hamster wheel.

Well put, Jamie. As always, you raise some interesting points, some of which, but not all, apply to me.

I'm not strapped for free time, so I don't feel like running the website is too much of a burden. I post what I want to post, and do it when I feel like doing it. I don't think that would change if I got a couple hundred more hits per day. Hosting charges aren't an issue for me either; the deal I've got with Dreamhost is pretty incredible (and cheap).

I'm quite familiar with the concept of being promoted without a salary increase, however...:-)

Hey, thanks for remembering Linkalog! Sometimes I forget about it myself. There really was no formal 'group.' I just had a wide-open input form -- anyone could post (but it was usually me). And you know it was an altogether different internet era, that I could do that and not be snowed under with spam posts. It ran on a hacked up guestbook script originally, then on a Dreamhost guestbook widget. A few Exotica people dropped in, but you and Mo were the only ones who contributed on a repeat basis.

The last chunk of the archive includes an index to the whole batch in the right sidebar:

http://ookworld.com/linkalog/linkalog_jul_sep2001.html

At Irregular Orbit in the present, it seems like I've done about all I can to drive regular readers away, but it doesn't quite die off altogether. It's mostly a reading and listening diary these days.

My best blog was Pancordia:

http://ookworld.com/pancordia/

If only I'd had the content and drive to make that what it should have been, it could have fueled an accordion revolution.

As for comparing ourselves to BoingBoing, we have to remember:

1) It's been running since early 2000.

2) Before that (at least as early as '96) it was a webzine.

3) And long before that was the print 'zine.

So that's years and years of name recognition piling up there. And let's face it, they make tons of posts every day. Some aren't very good, but the constant flow keeps us checking back.

Good interview, congrats.

I didn't realize that your input form was public, I always thought it was some sort of top sekrit URL where only us cool kids could go and post our contributions to Linkalog. I'm crushed.

When the Accordion Revolution comes, you'll be the first one to be stood up against the wall and forced to play "Lady Of Spain".

As for BB, my comments in the interview about becoming bigger than them were meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, Bella edited out a sentence that would've made that a bit clearer. I've always enjoyed Mark F's contributions; He was also very, very good to me, referral-wise, and we have had some interesting e-mail conversations about punk and fanzines.

You brought the cool to Linkalog all on your own.

My accordion revolution would have thrown off the oppression of "Lady In Spain." I never learned it, on purpose. But I did play a jaunty rendition of the Popeye song.

Mark F is a prince among men and a darned good guy.

Indeed he is. He mailed me a pile of old dead-tree bOINGbOINGs last year, and I gave him a couple of my extra Cool and Strange Music mags in return.