Who Are You?

I've mocked other bloggers (with only the kindest intentions) for assuming they know who their audience is, for thinking the readership of the vast blogosphere is knowable. I'm irritated when other bloggers make snide or unfriendly comments about persons who might actually be reading their blog, unbeknownst to the blogger.

I try my darnedest to avoid that sort of thing on this blog, mostly because it just isn't nice to say mean things about people, and partly because you never know who's reading.

The blogosphere might seem ephemeral and fleeting, with blog posts erased by a click of the "delete" button, but that is a false impression. Site feeds send your every post out to the world, even if you only had it up for five seconds. Archiving sites store every entry for future generations to peruse. The illusion of impermanence might lull us into unwise posting, but the savvy blogger knows better.

I say this smugly from my soapbox, but I have a confession: I, too, am guilty of assuming I know who my audience is. I know most of you by name, I have met (and am related to) perhaps the majority of you, and I can see where many of the rest of you come from via tracking software. (It sounds so Big Brother when you put it like that!)

But the fact remains: I don't know who all of you are. Thanks to RSS feeds (which I love -- don't get me wrong), my tracking software can't tell me who all reads my posts, and even the tracking info I do get is incomplete. I get blog hits from the strangest places, from the oddest search engine strings, and even from nowhere, as far as I can tell.

So today I ask you: Who are you? Leave a comment. Say hello. Introduce yourself. Oh, and lest I forget, welcome! We're glad to have you.