"Let’s see if I’ve got this straight," he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted
"It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there’s this couple lying naked in bed
reading the Enclyclopaedia Britannica to each other,
and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Resurrection.
Do they know how to have a good time or don’t they?"
- carl sagan

Remember that bit in the movie “Contact” where a signal sent back to earth from outer space carried the images of Adolf Hitler during the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics?  The idea that every TV and Radio signal we let loose into space may be our first impression to life on other planets is downright scary.  The last thing we need are alien civilizations judging our species based on the Fox Network!  I’ve often wondered if the fact that we’ve not met aliens yet is only because they are avoiding us. 

What may be of interest to paddle bloggers and bloggers in general is what happens as soon as we hit that “publish” button on our blogs.  In much the same way that a radio signal flies out into space, our blogs head off into cyberspace.  Once they are out there they cannot be taken back or deleted.   Quoting Wired Magazine, “Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.”  They have a great little Flash animation set up to display this right here.

In addition you have websites such as Archives.org storing monthly snapshots of your websites for all times as well.  In fact “Archives” is a great place to go find an old file when you accidentally delete something.

Being a web guy myself I keep track many aspects of my websites.  Take KayakQuixotica for example.  I know that in peak paddling season here in the north nearly 2000 unique visitors come to the site each day.  This time of year it’s closer to 1200. You guys come from all over the globe, and even from places I can’t imagine having much interest in kayaking. Chad?? I also can see what people search for when they find this site, and what they search for internally when they get here.  Occasionally that will influence what I write about or at least have me review my older posts to see what they are reading.  I also see what pages are more popular than others and what posts are still being read years after they were first published. (Yikes!)  I also see all the clicks out of the website which tells me how many people head out to Silbs blog or to NDK for that matter.  Regardless of what some believe you can’t track a person (not easily anyway), just numbers.   What’s worth noting is that all this information is always tracked, even on a blogger blog.  The only thing is you may not have access to it.  Still, someone does.   

In the business world you can expect tech savvy companies to be listening in to what you and your readers are saying.   Magazines can watch blogs for trends that help them decide what content to publish.  Manufactures can see when they are getting slammed for customer service issues, or when it looks like a product is getting a good response.  Usually you’ll never know they were reading what you had to say, but it counts.  Especially if they believe you have an audience or are perceived to have authority on a  given subject.  In addition, blogs often compete on search engines making them just as likely to be read as official websites. Unlike message boards  where posters tend to be anonymous and “hit and run” with their opinions,  active bloggers often hold more weight because they tend to take more personal responsibility for the opinions they express.  You would’nt think that publish button could do so much would ya?

It seems these days there are new paddle blogs coming online every day and it’s great to have all the voices and ideas out there.  It’s probably a good idea too, to think about where your words go.  We’d hate to have you keeping the aliens away.

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