I've been thinking about Robert Scoble's piece on encouraging traffic to weblogs, and Burningbird's quite persuasive response. The gist of her reply is, write for yourself, about the things you care about, and don't try too hard to lure your audience. I think they're both right, Scoble has some good tips and Burningbird is right about authenticity.

I just checked the search phrases that have brought people to my site this month. The top ones are:

sunny delight 9.1 %
john moore 3.4 %
narcissism 2.9 %
lovemarks 2.5 %
the gherkin 1.8 %
yotel 1.8 %
johnnie moore 1.8 %
unjobbing 1.6 %
spam bayes 1.6 %
high resolution atom.gif 1.6 %
houston it s worth it 1.3 %
modesty 1.2 %
pcmdoncall 1.2%

The unpredictability of this list amuses me. My rants on Sunny Delight were not written to appeal to anyone really, just to get something off my chest. Unjobbing, spam bayes and houston-it's-worth-it are all plaudits for smart stuff from other people. I have no clue what pcmdoncall has to do with my site.

I so often find that posts which I think are rather super but get no apparent response, whilst others dashed off in a hurry get a flurry of interest.

I keep coming back to this less-than-totally-reliable rule of thumb for a complex world: please yourself.