who notices

The months go by and you're convinced you have three readers (occasional). Then you get an email from somebody you've written about. And maybe it wasn't even anything recent. In Val Gerstle's case I mentioned her poem in a post from January 05.

To my surprise (as I noted in my last post) a Google search for "Val Gerstle" presents LoveSettement as the first result. Curious about Val's lack of web presence and LoveSettlement's relative prominence I tried other search engines, yahoo and dogpile. Though dogpile claims it includes search results from Google neither it nor yahoo found the LuvSet mention. That's what I'd expect if not for Google. I mean, technorati, which says it restricts its searches to blogs, will sometimes overlook mine.

I don't even have a stats service these days so I'm not obsessing about my web presence. It's just curious.

My brother once posted a list on his blog of all the old high school friends he wondered about. He thought, if they google themselves maybe they'll find that I want to know what they're up to and will drop me a line.

I suppose, too, if you want a search engine to discover what you write you should write about subjects that few others are writing about. Don't bother bemoaning the evils of Halliburton or cooing over Brad Pitt. Natter on about someone who is only known to himself or to an exclusive subsubsubset of the technically challenged. It probably helps if their (salty grain of) fame crystalized at least several years before the internet age.