The consequences of blogging success.

Success at blogging is a fine mixture of persistence, writing skill and luck. Recently, I have got "lucky" and find that my blog traffic has grown tremendously. This is mainly due to the linking to my blog, by a few major sites that have decided it is appropriate to do so. The results have been startling.

To give you an idea of the change, I will detail my blog traffic over the past week. Last Thursday, I had 341 visitors, for the day; last Friday, 264. These are typical days. On Saturday, I had 248 visitors and on Sunday (always the quietest day) there were 207 visitors. All this is fairly normal for a week. However, on Monday, I had 1,452 visitors; on Tuesday, I had 9,664 visitors; on Wednesday, I had 1,237 visitors and today, so far with half the day left to go, I have had 1,658 visitors. This is very strange. The previous peak day over my two years of blogging was a peak of 3,000 when news of Ainan's achievements first broke in Malaysia. Most of the visitors, then, were from Malaysia. This time, the visitors are from all over the world, since the connecting sites have a global readership.

Were I to use a literary analogy, it is as if I have suddenly jumped from the "midlist" of blogging, into bestsellerdom...at least for the time being. I will have to confess that this makes writing my blog feel like a different kind of exercise. No longer am I writing for a select bunch of people "in the know", in the equivalent of a modest auditorium. No, I am now writing for a global audience of thousands, in the equivalent of a stadium. It feels very different. It feels as if I should now be more careful...yet that is not a feeling that I want. You see, what I have liked about blogging is its freedom. There is no editor, apart from myself, when I blog. There is no other power to say "yeah" or "nay" to my words or what I write - and I enjoy that freedom and have used it fully. If an enlarged audience should lead me to feel somehow inhibited, that would be a pity. I need, as a writer, to feel that freedom to write as I will - for that is what, for me, blogging is all about. It is the ultimate expression of mental freedom, since, only in the blogging format, are there no real restrictions as to what a writer says (except for legal ones, of course). In all other formats - be it for a newspaper, or in a book, there is always another person or people with a say in what the author is allowed to say.

I hope in a few days, I will get used to writing, now, for a much larger audience and that I am able to be as free as I was before. Logically, I think, it should be something I can do - but there is an illogical element in human matters, where feelings are concerned. It IS different to speak to a small room and to a large stadium, in real life - and it feels different, too, on this blog. It is not long since I could look at the records of everyone who visited and come to understand what led them to read my blog, where they were from and what they were searching for. I can't do that now. There are just too many readers. So, I have to be content, now, to write for a large crowd, instead of having a quiet conversation with a few "in the know".

If you are new to my blog: welcome. I try to update it daily and I write about many things - not just giftedness (though this is a common topic). I always write about social issues of relevance to many people and any issue that I feel is worthy of remark, be it the survival of mankind, or the nature of success.

Thank you for deciding to visit and read my words. Don't judge the whole on the contents of one or two posts, for there are many different kinds of posts here. Just take your time to read around. Most people should be able to find something of interest to them. The Guide to Scientific Child Prodigy is a link at the bottom of every post. It is helpful but does not list all posts, just most of them.

Best wishes to you all, wherever you are from.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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