After giving my first podcast a try, I noticed I couldn’t get the “Show/Hide Player” and “Popup” to work. It was already past midnight, but rather than just turn in and try again in the morning, I resolved to work on it until it was fixed.

I spent three hours on the problem and finally gave up at 3AM. Man was I cheesed. I hated it when something wasn’t working right, but the more I kept at it, the more it seemed to break. When I woke up the next morning, I sat down and resolved the issue inside of 5 minutes. Sheesh. I need to learn how to let things go until I can come back to a problem with a better frame of mind.

I had other issues to fix though, but nothing really urgent (an invalid feed here, a few poor link colors here, etc..) Still, I spent the better part of my day just doing blog related housekeeping. I hadn’t even eaten till around 4.

I think I need a life. With my plans of attending law school shot to hell, I guess with nothing better to do I’ve been turning my focus to blogging again, even though I’m still not really sure what my niche should be. Hearing the success stories of how some bloggers have managed to monetize their blogs to the point that they could quit their full time jobs has me wistfully yearning for the same. With few exceptions, there’s nothing I’d like more than to travel the states and abroad, living the life of a nomad without being tied down to a job that keeps me in one place. And wherever I went, I’d use my newfound freedom to try to help people. It was the kind of life I could only dream about.

Theoretically, such a life could be possible by being a professional blogger (or writer). But the problem with me is that I have nothing interesting to offer (which also explains why no woman wants me either). I don’t have the kind of material that could draw a large crowd, and I’m just not smart enough or creative enough to build content that could land me a sizable audience. The really sad thing is that I consider writing to be one of my better talents, and I still suck at it. Ugh.

I guess even after 30 years on this planet, I still don’t know who I am, what I like, what I should do, or what I’ve been made to do. This sense of helplessness and lack of purpose is what continues to fuel the suspicion that maybe I wasn’t meant to be born after all. But if I was, then the question remains: who am I? Am I a writer? A preacher? A musician? An actor? A lover? No…. definitely not a lover.

I guess hiding under a rock for most of my life has made me completely ignorant of what really matters to me. Maybe the more I put myself out there, the more I can come to know where my niche really lies.

Well it was bound to happen. I never got into podcasting partly because I didn’t have the privacy or the equipment for it so I could let loose, and partly because I truly, truly hate my voice. It just sounds gayish to me, and I always yearned to have a stronger macho sounding voice that would make women fawn all over me. Ah well, maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to 80s music for too long.

Brace yourself my dear readers. You will never be the same again.

My First Podcast!

Update: Due to using an encoding rate that didn’t jive with the built in player, my first podcast makes me sound like Alvin the Chipmunk. I actually think I sound better this way.

“Hey Linc,” Mick waved me over, “I was talking to the boss today, and guess what he called the music you listen to??” (Check out my musical tastes here)

“What?”

“Lonely White Boy Stalker music,” he said with a smirk.

“Really,” I replied. “Well listen here, I got another brand of music I love to listen to. It’s called “Angry White Man With His Foot Up Boss’s As—” just as the boss himself walked in.

“Hi guys, what’s new?”

“Nothing,” I said abruptly, and quickly walked back to my desk.

Honestly, I don’t know how some people do it. It took me literally all day just to check out places like Digg, Reddit, MyBlogLog, and so on. Just to read the latest feeds from my newsreader sucked up so much time that before I knew it, it was 3AM and my brain was fried from fatigue and an overload of information. How do people find time not only to sift through the all the crap out there, but also blog 20 posts a day AND work a full time job on top of that? My goodness.

I mean really, go here and tell me if you don’t just feel a little overwhelmed. Not that I wasn’t finding anything worthy of interest, it was just that I was finding too MUCH. Just last night I found an article pointing me to Orb, which might be the perfect solution for streaming my music, videos and photos from my home PC.. If they ever block Launchcast at my job, I have an alternative source for streaming music to keep me from going bat crazy with boredom (unless the schmucks block Orb too). But that little detour alone kept me busy for over an hour, and there were still dozens of other noteworthy items and links that were coming in a mile a minute.

Man, I’m gonna have to find some way to streamline all this content if I want to avoid getting brain tumors from processing too much info. In the meantime, I concluded my little blogging experiment to see what submittals I made to the social networking sites out there drew the most traffic. The undisputed champion was StumbleUpon, which easily brought in over 1000 visitors to my blog in just one day. In my blogging prime, the most traffic I had ever seen on a given day was 500 visits, so you can imagine my reaction to this shocking revelation. I also noticed StumbleUpon visitors logged much higher page views than any other referring source as well (an average of two page views per visitor). Reddit was a distant second, bringing in about half the traffic StumbleUpon did with a 1:1 pageview ratio. So while people using StumbleUpon stuck around for a while, the Reddit crowd were mostly hit and run. Snobs.

Digg on the other hand brought in a whopping 15 visits. It was kinda funny to digg one of my posts here and then watch as it literally showed up on page 16 of Digg’s Upcoming/Newest Stories a mere 10 seconds later. Apparently there seems to be some competition here. It seems promotion through Digg is more rewarding for people who already have high traffic volumes (and therefore a lot of potential Digg voters) than those who don’t. But for those occasions when I experience a random moment of clarity and piece together a brilliant, stunning work of literary art such that the world has never seen before, I might try having it stumbled first and then putting up a Digg button, so StumbleUpon visitors who sat gaping in breathtaking awe of my brilliance can Digg it as well. It might be enough to create a second wind effect that could bring in even more traffic. But that’s a job and an an idea for another day.

Submitting my posts to Del.icio.us, NewsVine and a smattering of other sites resulted in zippo hits. I’ll probably still use Del.icio.us (or Ma.gnolia) for its bookmarking services, but networks like NewsVine looks waaaay too convoluted and news-oriented for my tastes. Blinklist, Meshly and maybe one or two other places actually brought in some modest traffic counts, so I may continue to use these services and see how it goes.

Perusing all these sites by the way may have been a real time sucker, but it was also a great learning experience for me. It’s given me a much better handle on how I can properly promote my blog and some of my writings, especially to a targeted audience. And now that that’s over, maybe I can finally get back to doing some actual blogging.

So… uh…. how YOU doin’?