Q&A: What About Strangers Reading My Blog?

Today's question comes from Alexis, who I suspect tried to hide her identity by using her formal name instead of the moniker she uses in social circles.

Knowing that anyone reads my blog at all is extremely flattering. We'll start out with that.

As for knowing me before you had even "met" me, I can totally relate. There are some bloggers that I call friends who I have never met (but hope to someday); I feel like we already have shared so much, due to me reading their blogs. Plus there is the aspect of living in a celebrity culture, where the common man can access so much information about movie stars that he feels like they are BFFs (my celebrity BFF is Emma Stone!). Not to say that I'm Internet famous, like Nova Rella wrote about on SDB recently.

Blogging can also be such a numbers game. If you can rack up X number of page views or Y number of subscribers, you can monetize your blogging or gain notoriety that you can utilize in other ways. I am not a big-time blogger. I don't have X, Y, or even Z numbers. Because I only know a finite number of people in real life, I hope that there are strangers out there who like what I do.

Lastly, since the Internet is somewhat based in anonymity, I haven't really thought about being upset or worried that people I don't know are reading my blog. A lot of what I write about isn't particularly private or potentially exploitable; the only person I am comfortable exploiting around here is myself, which I do plenty of.

To summarize:

1. I am flattered that people read my blog.
2. I think it's cool when people recognize me from my blog.
3. I hope that more people I don't know will read my blog.
4. If I don't know you and you read my blog, I would like to get to know you.

P.S. Alexis, I hope I didn't treat you shabbily at whichever party we met. If it is the one I'm thinking of, I was a bit stressed out because Jacko and Lu were running around a not-childproofed house.