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Summer of Love, he calls it.

My name is kapgar and this is my first time taking part in the Summer of Love. Heck, in all honesty, I’m transcending virginal status in a couple ways right now. Not only is this my first time as a contributor to Karl Erikson’s Summer of Love, but it’s also my first time guest blogging, well, anywhere really. Guest blogging is something that has always intrigued me and I’ve had several great writers guest over on my blog. But this is the first chance I’ve had to return the favor to anyone else. I feel like a young prostitute walking the mean streets of LA for the first time. So dirty… so nasty… and yet, so frightened.

Don’t worry, he says. It won’t be so bad.

Am I the only one to feel an inordinate amount of pressure when blogging on someone else’s site? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been blogging at your own place. For example, I’ve been blogging for just over three years and keeping an online journal since 1998. I’ve been writing out the yin yang for longer than I care to remember and I’m still sitting here trying to calm my incessantly pounding heart. Wiping sweat off my brow. Attempting to slow down my breathing. And nothing. This is Karl’s site, for Chrissake! Why am I feeling such performance anxiety about blogging here? This is a guy who has posed naked with a bottle of cologne, for the love of God! How bad can it be? What the hell do I have to worry about?

I’ll go easy on you, he promises.

And, yet, worried I am. I not only have to perform up to the standards expected of me by my own readers, but now I’ve got to live up to the expectations of Karl, all his readers, and all my fellow Summer of Love-ites. It would’ve been fine if I were the only person writing. That way, if I wasn’t up to snuff, you all could forget about me more easily. Now, however, my name is forever going to be part of the Summer of Love at Secondhand Tryptophan. People who go back and look will remember me as that guy who can’t write to save his life. If I had only paid attention to the list of people whose writing talents Karl requested for participation in this event. Holy flaming dogshit, Batman! This is a regular high rollers of blogging convention! How the hell do I fit in? Why the hell did I say yes?

You won’t feel a thing, he says.

Won’t feel it? I’m being fed to the dogs! Literally! My lead-in is NYC Watchdog! What the holy hell?!?! And I’m being followed by Whit Honea! Great, so I get dropped in the middle of a Whit/Watchdog sandwich!?!? It’s like the Golden Gate Bridge up in here. Dawg and Whit are the two massive steal pillars holding up either end… then there I am, the sagging cables in between. Karl, that’s how you define “going easy on me?” At least if you’re gonna stick me in the middle of high profile bloggers, make it enjoyable for me. Why not somewhere smack dab in the middle of that Bec-Sandra-Kyra threesome? At least if my writing sucks and I go down in flames (which I surely would with them as well), I’d be doing so with a smile on my face.

Summer of Love, my ass.

I hate you, Karl. You’re dead to me.

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I had this whole other fantastical post written for my guest post here today. (I know those of you who know me are saying, “Yeah, right, Shelli. We know you don’t write your posts until the last minute”. I will say that in this case you might be right. Maybe.) Since I am guest posting both here and at Amber’s place today, I was going to start here with the first part of a story, then continue it on Amber’s blog so that you would have to go there to get part two. Then, of course, the climax and ending would be at my place (TWKS) so you would have to end up over there. That all came to a screeching halt when I read Karl’s post yesterday.

He has had some awesome bloggers guest posting for him. All of them so far have been awesomely funny, too. I can’t do funny. Especially when I am trying to do funny. It would just make you all say, “OMG, stop with the lame jokes and puns already.” I just don’t think I measure up to the scale of the guest posters he has had so far in this Summer of Love guest posting thingamajig that he has going on. At least not in the funny department. Dave’s, Karen’s, Kevin’s and SJ’s posts, to me, feel funnier than anything I could ever write. Don’t even make me look at who is going to come after me. I’ll get stage fright and pull this car over right now. I mean it.

Which brings me to the thoughts that were inspired by Karl’s post yesterday…

When I first started blogging, I read those big A+ list bloggers. You know the ones, Finslippy and Dooce and Cecily*. I didn’t know any better. I read and I commented on those other blogs or, even if they already had 500 comments and if they didn’t have open comments, I emailed them her. I even got some replies from her. (NO FUCKING KIDDING!! Several times.) Then I stopped reading them. And I avoided all blogs/bloggers who seemed to have “that thing”. You know, popularity. Why? Because I didn’t feel worthy.

When I first met Brad, someone told me he was a blogging icon. But he didn’t treat me like he was better than me. He treated me, well, like a little sister. And he brought me around and he introduced me to people like Britt, Dawg and Adam and from there I got to know Hilly and Karl and then Karl introduced me to Lisa. I had known of Lisa for a long time, but I never thought myself worthy of her blog. For that matter, I never felt worthy of Britt, Adam, Hilly or Karl, either. Until TequilaCon.

My whole outlook on everything blogging (and some things not about blogging) changed at TC. I realized that we are all just people. Really. All of our shit smells pretty yucky, even if it doesn’t smell exactly the same. Our good parts are all yummy in their own ways, too. When I met Lisa, and in the weeks since TC that I’ve gotten to know her, I have thought a lot about this. I would have NEVER let myself meet her if I had continued on with my way of thinking that I was not worthy of the likes of her. How tragic that might have been because she has taught me so much about life and living. (Thanks, Karl, for introducing me to Lisa.) Besides, at TC, we established that you can Google Me (I’m the top text link. No, the top image link is not me, I’m sorry to say.) and that I am a fucking blog icon (as I drunk texted Brad while I was there–I had to rub it in his face a little).

Shortly after TC (or maybe it was before, I’m old, I can’t remember everything), Britt was looking for a doohinky thingy that she wanted that was just like something that Dooce uses on her blog. She asked her readers if anyone knew what it was, could they please tell her so she could use it. I told her, “Ask Dooce what it is.” She was astonished. “Dooce?! Yeah, right,” she said (or, I might be paraphrasing, but you get the gist). I said, “She’s JUST a person, Britt.”

So, that’s what I’ll leave you all with. We’re all just people. We all want the feedback (well, maybe Dooce doesn’t since usually her comments are closed) and attention. We all need friends. There’s no such thing as too many friends. You never know when you’re going to need every. Last. One. Of them.

*If I had never read Cecily, I wouldn’t have met, and become good friends with, Sarah who re-introduced me to Cecily at TequilaCon.

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Thanks to SJ for another great guest post here in the Summer of Love. Yes, it’s true, I hate LOLcats AND I hate the “word” w00t. But SJ was able to take both concepts and make me laugh…not easy.

Tomorrow it’ll be Shelli from Shelli’s Sentiments! Woo hoo!

I’ve had people ask me recently why I’m never on chat. It’s true that I am kind of allergic to chatting, though I go through some chat spurts once in a while. Most of the time, chatting is rather boring for me, truth be told. Unless I’m chatting with a good friend like Hilary.

And because it’s such a rare occurrence, me chatting, on the odd occasion I DO get online with my chat client I get barraged with people hitting me up for chat. Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! Suddenly there are 15 windows open and I don’t even have enough hair to pull out at the moment. It’s overwhelming.

So there you have it…why Karl hardly ever chats.

I’ve heard the term “Alpha Blogger” batted around the blogiverse for a while now, so it’s nothing new. What IS new is that I’ve recently been labeled an Alpha Blogger myself. Huh? ME?

I don’t know how you could possibly confuse me as an Alpha Blogger. Hell, I don’t even know how you DEFINE Alpha Blogger. So let’s look it up, shall we?

If you look up the definition of Alpha Blogger on Allwords.com you come up with the following:

alpha blogger
noun

1. (internet) A very popular, widely read blogger.

Hmm, okay. That gives us at least a starting point to discuss the term. How, then, do you define “popular” and “widely read?” I get a decent amount of traffic, I suppose, if you’re going to use statistics as a metric. Nothing amazing, really, but I’m happy with the traffic I get.

According to Woopra, I get anywhere from 120-500 unique visitors a day. Nowhere near some people I know, like Jester or Dave, but still.

So is it traffic stats that make you an Alpha Blogger? If so, I don’t think I qualify.

Is it comments? Again, I don’t think I’d qualify. I generally get 20-40 comments a day. Sure, there are some posts that generate more comments, but that’s a common phenomenon on most blogs. When I’m writing a post, I can’t gauge whether or not it’s going to get a ton of comments. Seems to be arbitrary, which ones get more attention than others.

Then there are odd cases like Jester’s blog. During one of his hourly radio shows, we talked about blog traffic and he mentioned he gets quite a lot of hits every day, but very few comments. He gets far more traffic than I do; yet I get far more comments than he does. How the hell does that fit into the Alpha Blogger scheme of things? I have no idea. But he was thrown into the same Alpha Blogger pool that I was.

I admit that when I hear the term Alpha Blogger I kind of get the heebie jeebies. It smacks of elitism somehow, at least when you hear it in the context it’s often used. Someone said recently, “Oh, you’re one of those Alpha Bloggers, aren’t you?” in the same sort of tone you might say, “Oh, I just stepped in dog shit, didn’t I?”

I replied, “Who, me?”

It’s true that I hang with some really good bloggers, some of them with relatively large readerships. Hilly, Miss Britt, Avitable, Dave, Kapgar, and the list goes on and on. But that’s what happens when you reside on the Internets…you connect with people. You find good blogs to read, you comment, and eventually those people check out YOUR blog and hopefully bookmark it. Over time, you become friends and you introduce them to other friends…they introduce YOU to some of THEIR friends, etc. That’s the nature of the Internet.

Everyone has their own little corner of the Internet, populated with their friends. Some of these corners overlap here and there. But MY little corner is certainly not an elite group. It’s not something that “outsiders” can’t get into. (For a nominal fee, of course. *cough*) Really, it’s pretty simple. Write good blog posts on a semi regular basis and you’re pretty much in. Come to TequilaCon or any of the other blogger gettogethers and you’re pretty much in. There’s no secret formula, really. We joke about the PRB (People’s Republic of Blogistan) but really have no idea what the boundaries of this little country are.

But having a little corner in the blogiverse does not make you an Alpha Blogger. Those are totally separate issues and somehow they seem to have gotten lumped together.

Alpha Bloggers, to me, are people like Heather Armstrong, Robert Scoble, Arianna Huffington, and Seth Godin. People in the Technorati Top 100. They get mega traffic and are probably raking in the major money from their blogs, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d LOVE to be an Alpha Blogger. More specifically, I’d love to make a living from my blog. But that’s not the case. As it is, I get enough to cover my monthly blogging costs, but that’s about it.

If anything, I’m a C-List Blogger. Or a SecondHand Blogger. And that’s just fine. For now.

What do you think? Am I an Alpha Blogger? What defines an “Alpha Blogger” for you? Is it a clique thing or a popularity thing? Both? Go ahead and discuss. I really want to know. I mean, if I’m going to belong to a club I think I ought to know how the hell I got in in the first place.

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