Weird story. I thought …

Weird story. I thought I knew who my readers were. I was pretty well-tuned into my audience, aware that most of them were web designers, new media people, open source people, and software developers. As a way to better communicate with my readers, I recently put up AOL IM screen name up on the front page. There it is, right over there under the calendar. I used the assumption that since most of my readers were “in the industry” or had at least a couple years of experience on the web, that they’d know how and when to contact me using AOL IM. What I didn’t expect was what happened last night. I was catching up on email, something I do almost every night, when an IM request came through from a screen name I didn’t recognize. OK, so a reader wants to chat. Fine. I accepted the request and proceeded to ask him who he was. Silence. A couple minutes pass by. He responds, “Hold on.” I wait, and ask him again who he is. He responds, “I’m just learning this Net thing.” Hmmm, that’s odd. Definitely not a typical reader. I kill the IM window and forget about the whole incident until today when long-time reader Adam at thirdball.com emails me and says that CamWorld is in the most recent issue of Yahoo Internet Life. Aha! So, that explains it. I’m getting newbies from the magazine. I guess this just proves that you can never really completely know who your audience is. Now, if only I could figure out a way to stop people from filling up my referrer logs with search queries for ‘sex cam’ and ‘naked cam.’ Heh.

Here is the link to the article (I assume) that my site appears in. Something called “Who Let The Blogs Out.” The link is broken.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at April 12, 2001 01:38 PM

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