Cut to the scene of “On the Bloggerfront” where in a taxi, a tired old blog post sits dejected next to its former friend, Google, looking smug and dapper in an overcoat:
Google: Look, kid, I — how many readers you got, Slick? When you posted one hundred and sixty-eight times in a month you were beautiful. You coulda been another Gary Vaynerchuk, and that skunk we got you for an SEO consultant, he brought you along too fast.
Blog Post: It wasn’t him, Google, it was you. Remember that night at South by Southwest you came down to my dressing room and you said, “Kid, this ain’t your best post. We’re going for the post by Huffington.” You remember that? “This ain’t your best post”! My best post! I coulda taken anyone apart with my words! So what happens? She gets the trending post on X and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my helper, Google, you shoulda indexed me a little bit more. You shoulda raised my rankings just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to write those Huff Post articles for the short-end money.
Google: Oh I had some links shared for you. You saw some exposure. Was just below the fold.
Blog Post: You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Google.
With apologies to director Elia Kazan and screen writer Budd Schulberg
Modified a bit from the film
Of course my writing here is solely for my sake. It’s the outboard brain, thinking in public, life note taking. I am not hoping for fame or fortune for blathering here (but would not refuse a little bit of either, hey I am human!)
If you’ve been at this for any length of time, honestly you forgot much of your written past. That is a positive factor to me. In searching your archives, you might stumble across something you wrote before that has faded from memory.
But likely there is one or a few posts that you wrote thinking… this ***** is good! People are are going to be motivated, they will talk about it, comment, it might just make a splash in the public space.
And it goes thud. No comments. No feedback.
A post that coulda been a contender!
It’s not about counts and views. That’s spurious. According to me stats the top read posts all time here are at least the first two I had to reread to know what they were about.
- Paging Image Detectives (2017) in which I issued a challenge to find the source of an image
- Deciphering the Wired/iPad Tea Leaves (2010) Something about an ipad to read Wired magazine. Huh?
- Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 (2014) my guide to created “Connected Courses” in WordPress with the Feed WordPress plugin. This was my bread and butter work in the mid teens
So it’s not anything that emerges from stats, its a post you remember vividly.
What is your Coulda Been a Contender Post?
Maybe this is mine! Many people will read, share, and put forward their own. Shrug. Whatever, I can stay content as a bum.
Its one you can recall without stumbling over it. Perhaps it was the time it represented. Or they way it came together. Or just… well you are the judge.
Here’s mine.
My Coulda Been a Contender was about… tying my shoes!
Now it gets funny as my memory of this post seems a bit grander than the way it appears. But it “ties” together several different strands. First of all, its a mundane topic seemingly of little importance. It has some roots in my own childhood experience. It was triggered by a random reads of a blog post and also a listen the same day to a connected topic in a podcast. But it also goes deeper. Let’s start with the post:
It started with reading a blog post by Bud Hunt on “Tying My Shoes” featuring a TED Talk by someone named Terry Moore who directly reminds me I have the same problem- I never learned to tie my shoes the “right” way, and the fix is very subtle, an undoing, a just slightly different way of thinking. I start the post with my own “learning it wrong” and never unlearning it for 50 years.
And the fix is really just to cross the laces in a different direction. And it has worked for me. Like Bud writes:
Change is hard. And it starts with small moves for good reasons. One member of my team said that she doesn’t need to learn to tie her shows differently, because her laces don’t come loose. She’s right – if the goals don’t line up, then you shouldn’t change. You should only bother to make a change for yourself or for someone else when it makes sense to, when your plan needs, or maybe even requires, that you align yourself differently and you work to change some habits.
But if your habits aren’t the problem, if they’re helping you get stuff done, then you’d better not change them. They’re the right habits to have.
The habits of my first thirteen years of work and professional career stuff aren’t all serving me well at this stage of my work. And while it’s taking me a long time, I’m starting to figure that out.
https://budtheteacher.com/blog/2017/04/13/tying-my-shoes/
Bud! You’ve not blogged since 2022, and you are such a damn good writer. You could easily be a contender.
Yet what tied it together more and what pushed me to blog (can I overdo the metaphor?), was the same day I read Bud’s post, I heard on NPR radio a Science Friday story on the physics of shoe tying that confirmed with SCIENCE they forces that make shoe laces come loose.
After that I had to stop whatever I was doing, made a little video, and wrote that blog post.
It’s not at all about shoe tying. It’s about the powerful effect of learning to do something differently, with just a small adjustment. It’s about unlearning the same old ways. It’s about doing this process on one’s own, not directed by a lesson or some chatGPT hoo hah.
On it’s own I am not saying its brilliant writing or anything super prophetic. But it was the how the forces came together, and served as ane example of being tuned in to the world around you for things that generate an act of writing. Yes, and there is a meta post about the ways an idea for writing emerges (plus some fun with pickles).
Thus being a “contender” blog post is not about shine or deft wording, it’s the experience from brain sparking idea, to drawing pieces together.
Shoe tying is my contender.
What’s Yours?
Do you have a memorable post you wrote that feels like no one noticed? Tell the story, maybe even in a blog post, and/or send a link below. At least you will get one more reader!
Featured Image: Okay, not quite kosher, but I took a single frame from the YouTube clip of the Taxi scene from One The Waterfront, and applied multiple layers and effects to degrade the image. It’s not really licensable, and I await the legal emails with a threat. If that happens, it might be replaced by an image of two cats. Rules, shmules. I could have slapped a prompt into a GenAI tool and used it fine? WTF.
Self boosting engaged! This is my ActivyPub powered blog, you can follow directly and reply to via @topdog
Get Federated!
I remember writing this post about writing digitally, back in 2009, and thinking, someone will read it and interact. There’s interest, right? My friend, Bonnie, did. That was about it. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
https://dogtrax.edublogs.org/2009/12/23/why-i-compose-with-digital-tools/
Kevin
PS — there is a project I referenced about getting “jazzed up” about that is still in “draft mode” 15 years later.
PSS — I am going to reach out to Bud.
I was hoping I’d remember reading that post, Kevin. Indeed it’s a contender, but I have to commend you for keeping up the digital creativity front at a steady pace since we first crossed tracks, dogtrax! You are a force, I see you.
I was always proud of ‘My Canada’.
Landed with a thud. Never did a thing.
http://www.downes.ca/post/57
Maybe no thud, but all your posts, our posts that still exist sit out there with some kind of harmonic resonance. I wish I had read this before I moved here, I am still on my own Canada learning curve. I would like to think all of this holds true for you now, some 21 years later?
I almost stopped at that image above “This is our Canada, a project still not complete” — these days I’d guess that was AI generated 😉
Still, I’d guess for you, and Kevin above, you write for the at and sake of writing, where the majority of the acts on the web are writing to be read, favorited, boosted.
I can actually be okay without the thuds. Because on some basis, you might just find something that you thought no one saw proves it wrong when they contact you. It’s less frequent for me that it used to be, but still as impactful as the first time something I tossed out in the mix ended up in an OLDaily post 20+ years ago.
Keep on writing the contenders!
I took time to write up a discussion I had with teachers about setting up weighted gradebooks based on learning skills rather than assignment completion. I don’t write for comments, but I was hoping to get a little feedback at least with some counterexamples or some more questions about how to interpret the grades. I always found those posts, when I read them, thought provoking. Maybe it was a little too niche?