Bloggers and Trends.

I’ve  lately been dedicating some time on researching a couple of algorithms that determine what kind of subjects are deemed to interest potential readers. It’s a delicate subject, because it’s very narrowly related to the issue of the free will. The reason for this is very simple; if your interests can be determined by an algorithm, this implicates that the majority of your choices are determined by external factors and not necessary in your own best interest.

Most people will strongly disagree that they would ever make a choice that goes against their own self interest , while their lives usually contain a whole string of “bad” decisions they’ve made. This is mostly due to the fact that the majority of our decision making plays at the subconscious level and when we make up our mind about a certain subject, it moves to the conscious mind who claims to have been all along in charge of the whole process (I’ve left the consciously taken unselfish decisions out of this equation).

I would like to extrapolate this reasoning to the way people blog or write books, where I seem to discern three different approaches that might illustrate the issues brought forward in the previous paragraphs.

The first category only produces contend about subjects that interest them en don’t give a damn about the subjects the majority of the readers want to read about. They deal with personal interests and issues that are mostly ignored by the majority of the public. I call them the centripetal ones. They are usually moderately happy because they have low expectations of ever deriving social or financial status from their activity, but find satisfaction into the writing activity itself. They just wish sometimes a little more feedback, but hey, a lack of feedback is what happens when you care only about subjects that leave other people indifferent.

And then you have the trendsetters. This type of blogger or writer has a finger on the social pulse and possesses the ability to formulate what’s latent in the public subconscious mind. The trendsetter deals with subjects that interest the reading public in general. Of course one could argue that since their minds are so much in tune with the subconscious human hive mind, their conscious thinking might have appropriated this flow of influences as its own original thoughts. Nevertheless, they’re probably the most satisfied and happy category.

The third category of bloggers and writers carefully researches the websites about the subjects that are most popular and concentrates on producing contend that addresses those issues. There you have the bloggers or writers for some niches that have been carved out by the trendsetters.  I define them as centrifugal because the subject of their contend is often of little interest to themselves. Their focus is on incrementing their social and financial status by struggling to draw some of the spotlights that shine upon the trendsetters into their own direction. This type is usually the most unhappy and dissatisfied kind.

To conclude this post, I guess that some among you will ask themselves where I’m placing myself as a writer and blogger. I gave this yesterday some thoughts and concluded that I’m too professional as a writer to be an amateur but not professional enough to care deeply about marketing, promotion and sales. I mostly write to process some convoluted thoughts and use blogging as a pressure valve to experiment with some new ideas. My drive to look for cryptomathematical connections between art, science and religion is often perceived as elitist and alienates a considerable amount of people. I range definitively among first category: the centripetal ones.