Eight hours gone

At eight hours each day, work takes up a fair chunk of my time and life. And while it may not be the most exciting job in the world, it still provides me with plenty to write about.

And yet I can’t.

Dozens of articles have been written about people being fired after slagging off their employers (or soon-to-be employers) on-line, without seeming to comprehend that their words may be read by bosses. That my name is attached to this website further ups the risk.

And so, at the present time, I am unable to write about a large chunk of my life.

So, at least at the current time, this blog will turn in yet another direction. I will attempt to, each day, post a short profile of a person, place or thing I’ve come across in the last 24 hours. I may or may not have spoken to, or interacted with, the person or thing profiled. But hopefully I can paint an intriguing, and maybe funny, portrait.

A change of address…

Returning to Canada necessarily means a blog with the address of ninehoursahead and the title of Perogies and puzzled looks must die. It also means I have another set of priorities and obligations on my hands, of which first and foremost is finding a job or begging for freelance gigs.

I haven’t altogether stopped blogging however. My new gig will hopefully be more focused and probing and will continue to provide me with a reason to compulsively check my stats.

To see for yourself go here.

I said, go here.

Thanks and all the best.

The future

You may have noticed the frequency of posts and photos have tailed off lately.

Soon it will get even slower and one day nothing may be here. We’ll see. Magda and I are returning to Canada in about a month. On Tuesday we’ll be flying to Milan and then, on Thursday, we’ll be going to Morocco, where the temperature is currently hovering in the low-20s. It’s snowing in Warsaw right now.

I’ll try and update this throughout our travelling through Morocco and Spain, although that will be determined by the availability of internet cafes and my general mood. From Spain we’ll fly back to Warsaw then, from there, to London and on to Canada at which point this blog will likely end.

Or this blog may merely change its focus and, possibly, its location. There are plans afoot.

Perogies and puzzled looks: the posting

What do Canadian politics and perogies have in common? Nothing! That is unless you’re keeping a blog visited by people who keep searching for the two terms.

Let me explain:

I’m a data junkie – someone who loves to look at graphs, charts and statistics. As such, one of the best parts about a wordpress blog is the stats page, which allows me to see how few people are reading what I’m writing (or, probably more accurately put, visiting the site – I doubt half the people who visit the blog read it. I know from personal experience that I only stop to read something on about half the sites I visit, even less when it comes to blogging.)

The blog stats section that reveals what type of search inquiries have led people to my blog. For example, a couple days ago someone queried “do perogies grow on trees???” I’m not making that up. So be it. What has me very interested is a spike of queries yesterday having to do with the mixing of Canadian politics and perogies.

Look at this list:

dion giving out perogies	2
canadian government perogy	2
politics and perogies	1
vilnius bunkers polish	1
dion and perogies	1
dion, perogies	1

Today a person has searched for “perogies the government”

WHY!?!? I’ve been scouring my brain and have come up with a couple half-baked explanations, none of which satisfy my curiosity. If you happen to have landed on this page after searching for the above terms, please, please, please leave a comment explaining your reasoning. My mental health demands it. As it is I’m left with the following theories:

One, the person is interested in Stephane Dion possibly handing out perogies (it would seem to me that he’d have better things to do but hey, whatever). However, I can find no record of him engaging in a perogy fry-up during election time or any other time for that matter. Two, why does the person keep clicking on my bloody blog?

The second potential reason is that a mysterious perogy person is interested in what I wrote about the government and has noted that the title of the blog contains the word “perogies.” Still, that doesn’t explain why each search term is different, not to mention the fact that I haven’t written much about Stephane Dion.

Third, people are desperately searching for Jeff Jedras’s blog and particularly an entry focusing on whether the Conservatives would prorogue parliament.

All this proroguing talk though has made me pretty hungry, and I’m craving, go figure, perogies. So I’m off to Price Choppers to pick up the necessities. How do you like to cook and prepare your perogies? Does Jason Kenney really like perogies, or just when he’s trying to woo the Ukranian community?

One problem, that entry was written in July. Then again, given the current state of the Canadian government, maybe perogies and proroguery make good blog-fellows.

As I write that last paragraph (and in particular the word ‘prorogue’ I came upon one final possibility: Maybe the searches come from different people, politically interested Canadians who misspell the word ‘prorogue.’ The spelling misstakes could be the result of just one letter out of place and google suggesting the word ‘perogy’ instead of ‘prorogue’ which, let’s face it, nobody had ever heard before this week. Or people just can’t spell. Either way, I’m favouring this scenario right now.

Am I wrong? Yes? No? Leave a comment.

Harder than it looks

I just added two blogs to the so-called blogroll on the right side of the page.

One, the beatroot, is about Polish politics. It seems to be well written, concise and worth a gander if you’re interested in the state of the country and are looking for an English (written) take on it. The other, Trzaskpraskowe, has very good photojournalistic images of Poland. All the captions and writing are in Polish so I can’t make heads nor tail of any other details other than potential place names. (Link 96 goes to Warsaw photos).

Finding blogs worth a read is harder than it looks. Most aren’t meant for a mass audience, of course, so don’t need to be held up to a critic’s lens. But it’s not hard to notice that, from their work, the publishers of these two look like they could be journalists of one shape or the other while most other blogs, not so much. And here I am linking to them. Maybe it just goes to show that even in the world of self-publishing and awful YouTube videos, some training and experience and talent goes a long way.

Show me your hits

Polandian is a great blog on the Polish experience. Much better, in fact, than this one, which is more of a mash-up of various ideas, some connected to my Polski residency.

The reason is pretty simple. They try harder and have more experience in Poland. Today I spent probably an hour cruising an internet and probably two or three working or an article I’m going to try and shop around to various magazines. While I may one day link to it, I’m not going to post it here because 1) it’s not going to be read by all that many people; 2) it’s not going to make me any money; and 3) I’m not going to be able to show it off to perspective employers. Aside from putting a piece of writing out on the net for immediate consumption (not an unappetizing concept itself), there isn’t much incentive for me to dedicate as much time to this blog as I do to writing targeted at newspapers and magazines.

The Polandian folks all appear to have non-journalism jobs and writing does not seem to be their career of choice. Ironically, that seems to give them the freedom to take the time to craft entertaining, interesting and helpful posts that probably don’t make them all that money. It has clearly found its audience and some of the posts have dozens of comments.

We shall see how this blog grows or withers but Polandian sets a mighty high standard to reach for.

Not another top-10 list

While I have hardly built anything resembling an audience – I bet most people who read this know me personally – this blogging thing has become fun. It’s hard to envision it making me any money and, for the time being, it more functions as a digital notepad crossed with a mass email to people who would otherwise want regular updates.

But it also holds the potential of millions. Perez Hilton makes a couple million dollars a year if not more. There are a good deal of other bloggers who make fair change from advertising dollars. And there are way, way more people who dream of making money by blogging.

If you type in ‘going professional blogging,’ you come up with blogs telling people how they too can make money. They say things like “stake out mindshare,” “Register a blog with Blogger,” and adding links, links, and more links.

From the limited amount of time I’ve spent doing the things they recommend (or at least those tips I can understand) the whole process makes one feel a little too much like a real estate agent (I’ve got a blog post about them to come). It is, though, also a little satisfying because you can see how many people visit your blog. Still, to get to the point of making money on a blog would seem to require a lot of effort writing boring tidbits designed not to inform but just drive readership. This article sums it up well. Then you have the growing professionalism of, well, professionals.

Indeed, the blogs that I visit are attached to major news sites and not really any different than a rolling column. How an amateur competes, I’m unsure. It was probably easy back when Andrew Sullivan started out. Not that it was easy work but it was easy to compete with what was, in effect, nothing on the part of real news outlets. Now you’re probably better of getting a job and then turning to blogging while employed at that outlet than to spend all your time on a blog that gets you nowhere.

Of course, this is all philosophical right now for me. I don’t need to build an audience because this blog has a different function that doesn’t need an audience. Still….. If it made me money, I wouldn’t object.

Celebrity spin

It feels weird to be writing for a distinctly different audience than when I was at The Morning Star – at this point that being no audience at all. And since this is the web, where keywords reign supreme and everything needs to be searchable I feel I should work to optimize this blog for search engines.

So, let’s try a little story that, if all goes well, will tap into what people really want on the internet:

Walking down the road the man stops to look at a planter full of flowers. He is sick of politics, tired of hearing about BARACK OBAMA, JOHN MCCAIN, SARAH PALIN, JOE BIDEN, GEORGE W. BUSH. He’s sick of the Canadian election, the LIBERALS with STEPHANE DION, the CONSERVATIVES with STEPHEN HARPER and even the GREEN PARTY’s ELIZABETH MAY. He has totally forgotten about JACK LAYTON and the NDP.

“What a bunch of BOOBS,” he thinks. In the states, There is OBAMA, with his message of hope but his inability to stamp out the REPUBLICANS and JOHN MCCAIN. SARAH PALIN seems to bring some SEX appeal, but intellectually she seems only slightly ahead of BRITNEY SPEARS, LINDSAY LOHAN and PARIS HILTON (and beyond flashing their NAKED bodies at the cameras, one of them even made an honest-to-god PORN).

All these politicians seem to be just running for JOBS. If they were playing BASEBALL, they’d just be trying to hit SINGLES, rather looking for the long ball. And the MEDIA is just following the election like its an NFL game and we are all just GAMBLING on the outcome. But this isn’t TEXAS HOLD’EM, it’s not even TETRIS or a game for the XBOX 360 or PLAYSTATION 3. What happens will shape the future of North America.

What these ELECTIONS need is a sort of idea-VIAGRA. Something to get rid of the DRUDGE REPORTs out there. They need something to stop people from GOOGLE searching JENNIFER ANISTON, CLAY AIKEN and BIG BROTHER. Maybe someone needs to put out the mother of all YOUTUBE videos. It needs to link to a FACEBOOK page that is actually about something. But then the stupid people at FACEBOOK, decided to fix what wasn’t broken. Now everybody hates it and soon nobody will give a rat’s ASS about it.

But I digress. The point being, if there was a big idea out there, maybe things would change.

People would talk about it at weekend POKER. They would stop buying trashy magazines with BRAD PITT and ANGELINA JOLIE on the cover and forget about AMERICAN IDOL. Even kids will forget about DRAGONBALL and MILEY CYRUS for a couple minutes. Then their RITALIN will kick in again. But maybe, just maybe PEREZ HILTON would stop blogging about CELEBRITIES, people would realize how ridiculous WWE and pro WRESTLING is, and we’d get tired of JENNIFER LOPEZ. And maybe someone with some BALLS would take over DISNEY.

Otherwise we’ll just be talking about BOOBS bigger than PAMELA ANDERSON’s twins.

Might as well face it I’m addicted to blog

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m addicted to blogging.

Part of it is the fact that my mind is spinning faster than the Tasmanian Devil (analogy rating: 2/10), and part of it is because WordPress is simply amazing. As opposed to Blogger, the other blogging software with which I’m familiar, WordPress not only allows you to make your blog professional looking, easy to read and simple to use, but you don’t have to be Bill Gates to do so.

But I have to admit that it also appeals to another side of me. WordPress, you see, tells me how many people visit the site and even what posts they click on. It even keeps a handy graph (I love graphs). Writing for a paper, the relationship with readers is passive and you’re not always sure if they care about your words or the horoscopes on the other side of the page. Here I can see how many people are reading my words, even if it doesn’t reveal that most visitors are family and close friends.

That the stats display includes the aforementioned graph and records the posts and days with the most views appeals strongly to my competitive side. As a reporter in a city with only one real newspaper, competition isn’t something I naturally equate with writing. Sure every year awards are handed out, but that’s about as far as it goes.

This gives me highs to shoot at and lows to avoid. It also appeals to the very repressed marketer in me who wants to attract as many people as possible to the site. It’s shameless ego-feeding nonsense, but it’s pretty darn addictive.

Oh, and did I mention blogging allows me to link to things like this?