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’?

I’m in a slightly better mood today…. no I’m not. Ah well.

I signed up for Facebook after getting an email from them indicating that open registration was now allowed. As much as I hate social networking sites, (especially Myspace), Facebook though seemed far more sophisticated to me, sporting a MUCH cleaner look than that other networking site that shall not be named again. So I figured what the hay, and made the plunge. There are many networks and groups you can join, so I decided to try my local network to see if there were any likeminded hot looking girls that I could discreetly add to my list of friends.

There were plenty of them in my area… that is, of course, until I filtered the results. You can filter results in different ways, including political affiliations, so the first thing I did was filter the results to show only “very conservative” girls.

No matches. NONE. Good God.

So I tried just “conservative” and got back 11 hits… out of what had to be well over 1000 girls in the same network. Man did I pick the wrong political ideology to follow. It’s not that I have anything against liberals (other than the fact that I can’t stand them), but I do think whoever I hook up with ought to be on the same wavelength that I’m on, or at least understand where I’m coming from.

To be sure, there have been many times where I wished I had been a liberal atheist instead. My goodness, I’d have so many options I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’ve thought of pretending, but I can’t do it without looking transparent. It’d be obvious that I didn’t believe the liberal nonsense I’d be spouting, just so I could impress some girl. Hell I can’t even stomach saying the name “Clinton” without spitting. It’s just not who I am. And unfortunately for me, just by being who I truly am, that is, a conservative Christian, the dating pool has been reduced to a mere puddle.

As if to reinforce this point, last night I took the profile test for eHarmony… again. I don’t know why I keep going back to them, other than that I must be a real glutton for punishment, but having nothing else to do I wanted to see if I could finally get a personality profile that for once might be accurate. I answered the questions as best as I could, and got back a profile that wasn’t totally off the mark (but not much close to it either). I did think it was VERY accurate however when it described those ideal qualities that would make a match perfect for me.

After I finished the test, eHarmony did a search for matches…

“We have found no matches for you at this time.”

Yep, somebody up there is definitely having a lot of fun at my expense. If only I had a large family, then I could simply do what all the other red state Christians do: just marry a cousin of mine.