Writing, whether on the internet or otherwise, is like talking to a brick wall.  You're never quite sure how people are going to react and whether they will even bother to react at all.  One thing you might find extremely funny simply falls flat while items of mediocrity sometimes strike comedy gold.  It's also a lot more difficult to know your audience on the internet since you rarely know to whom you're writing to.  I've been doing a lot of thinking concening the site lately.  When I first started pollestad.net, it was well before the craze of blogs and personal web pages became mainstream.  It was a place for me to write about myself or, really, anything I felt like.  It's had its share of ups and downs, times when content was both flooding in and non-existant.  There have been a few core readers over the years -- with some still viewing periodically -- but nothing more than a handful.

All website owners yearn for a popular site, one visited by an umpteen amount of people with lively forums and feedback on what's going on.  A place where others can contribute and collaborate.  I won't lie, I've wanted that for almost as long as this website has been live.  I haven't always put in my best effort to keep things going but it's been there nonetheless, waiting with open arms for the web militia to find and conquer.  And all that serves is to point out the persistant flaw that this site has had since it's opening: it's intention.  The site was opened as a personal page for myself, to write about what I thought or observed.  Who is really going to care about that outside of a handful of people?  No one.  People surfing the web won't accidentally stumble upon something called pollestad.net and find it interesting to them, regardless of content.  Who wants to contribute and collaborate on something that bears one persons name instead of a generic title?  I've had a number of domain names over the years, many suited for a more general purpose website, and all have gone to waste in favor of keeping this site alive.  I guess I am starting to regret that decision now.  I'm not talking about the farks and slashdots of the world.  I don't want a website with thousands of visits per day.  I'm not trying to make money or make it my job to become a full-time web operator but I do regret locking myself into this pigeon hole.

Truthfully, I am not sure where I am going with this but it's something that I have been thinking about for quite a while and I needed to get it off my chest.  It may be the beginning of an end or the beginning of something new.  It's hard to say at this point.  It has been an interesting exercise regardless, the things that draw conversation.  A thread about my lost sunglasses provokes more user commentary than any attempt at in-depth, serious discussion.  I get more feedback on a clothing rant than I do on other topics I think far funnier.  And therein lies the problem: when you write on the internet, you never quite know what is going to happen.  People react differently to different things, even if they are people you think you know.  The pollestad.net website turned 5 years old on April 11th, something I can stand behind and be happy about.  I guess.  A website is only as useful as the audience it has finds it.  I've tried, unsuccessfully apparently, to draw more people in, to make it something other than me bitching about how bad I have it in life.  I've attempted in recent months to upgrade the content, to bring more humor and abstractness to the site, to make it more worthwhile to read.  I don't think I was very successful in that regard.  Selfish thinking I guess.  People have better things to do than to read a random mess of jumbled, unfunny ideas posted by a self-centered idiot who needs to have a whole site devoted to himself.  Was it fun along the way?  Sure.  Will it continue?  That's the million dollar question.