I Went Viral

Besides the posts I put up here, I write posts on Open Salon, a site for open blogging with a built in audience. Some are just re-posts of what's here and some are new posts, with no real rhyme or reason for what goes where. The difference is in readership.

At Sathre Sisters, Ellen and I have eight followers.  Seven are immediate family members and one is a friend who we guilted into signing up and who probably hasn't been back since. Not a single one of our eight followers read or comment on a regular basis. And although we didn't start the blog to get readers, we've found that it can get a little lonely without them.  Which is probably why our posts seem to have longer and longer lag times. 

In contrast, Open Salon has thousands of members and non-members who write and read and post and visit every day.  People who have been blogging there for a long time get lots of comments and hundreds of views and are clearly part of a community who have gotten to know each other from what they write.  Some who live in bigger cities even meet up on a fairly regular basis, and others have met up while traveling. It's a pretty liberal place with some truly talented writers and artists who are generally kind to each other, as well as to newbies who sneak in, like me.

I've only been there for a couple of months and am still navigating and discovering my way around.  But I'm also slowly building up what might be called a readership--people who stop by, leave a comment and maybe even a rating ( a sort of online high five). I'm thrilled when anyone views what I wrote and feel like I'm wearing a gold medal when I get a handful of comments or ratings.

Last month, while sitting in the bookstore waiting for people to come in, having already finished the crosswords and sudokus from two newspapers, I started writing a list of things I've learned from opening a bookstore.  It was kind of funny and kind of cute, but it was off the top of my head and it certainly wasn't Hemingway--or even Erma Bombeck, who would have been funnier.

I hadn't posted anything on Open Salon for a while, so I gave my scribblings the creative title of  "25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore," hit "post," and sent my list out into that unknown world of the internet.  A couple hours later I checked my Open Salon blog and saw that I already had 92 views, pretty much a record for me.  I checked again that evening and  my number had risen to 989, which certainly would have been a record if I hadn't been sure that it was really just a mistake.

It was only when I checked the next morning and saw that I had thousands of views that I knew something had happened.  I just wasn't sure what.  I played around with Google and saw that my post was coming up on some Tweet site called Tweet Buzz and something else called Topsy, as well as a bunch of other places--none of which I knew anything about or had anything to do with--but all of which seemed to be spreading my post to parts and people completely unknown to me.

It's been spreading ever since and only recently seems to be slowing down. Last time I looked, I had 418,266 views, which is roughly equivalent to every person in every town I've ever lived in, as long as you only count the actual City of St. Louis and not the whole metropolitan area.  And it's at least 417,000 more views than Ellen and have gotten during our entire maiden year on Sathre Sisters.

Now to put this in some sort of perspective, the song, "It's Friday," that went viral fairly recently had more than 47 million hits. Charlie Sheen went from zero to one million twitter followers in two days.  And Gaga has surpassed ten million followers on twitter. So, really, my claim of going viral is relative. I'm still a very small fish in the online sea. And, unlike Gaga, my numbers won't sustain.  I'm more of a blip.

Still, It's been fun.  It hasn't made me any money, and hasn't brought me any fame, but it did bring me two long lost college friends who tracked me down despite the fact that I don't use my full name on Open Salon.

More importantly, it's allowed me to brag to my internet savvy daughters that I've gone viral. I'm pretty sure they're proud. They didn't think I even knew the word.