When I first started blogging 20 years ago, (okay it’s been like a year and a half but it feels like a lot longer) I longed to be blogrolled more than anything, I mean how else was I going to be all famous and junk? I would spend hours pouring over other wine blogs, longingly looking at the list of recommend sites and wonder what it was going to take to see Samantha Sans Dosage there. I would read, or try to read, (I mean C’mon some of that crap…ugh) upwards of 20 blogs a day, looking for any tiny window for me to stick my head through, make my voice heard and through my, “compelling” comments, inspire the blog host and their readers to read my stoopid blog…brilliant, this was a brilliant, never before thought of plan.
I kept up that pace for about 3 months before I grew weary of reading the same story spit out in a different voice, reviews of Crane Lake Shiraz and basic wine information, that while helpful for some was stuff that I learned 10 years ago….not to mention the fact that the more I read, the more I wrote, I could see the bridge to the ever illusive blogroll getting longer and further away, my blog looking less like a wine blog each step of the way.
I surrendered my dream of being a famous wine blogger, (is there even such a thing?) and just kept writing, both for the few readers I did have and for me, and found that I was more at ease, happier and quite content…free from the constraints of bottling my voice, behavior and feelings in order to keep, “on point”, be a wine blogger. Yammering, I was just yammering, sometimes about wine, a lot of the time about over indulgence, once in awhile about me, my heart, my love and pain, for whatever reason people kept reading, my readership, (damn, don’t that sound fancy) grew and that was when I got the email from Tom Wark. “I love Sans Dosage, would you be willing to do a Bloggerview for me?”…well that made me swell with pride and that was when my, “readership” sailed into the double digits, who the hell needs to be blogrolled, I had arrived!
Been pretty much the same since then, I still read some wine blogs, the ones listed on my very own blogroll, and I truly enjoy reading them, do it daily and find myself compelled to comment from time to time but not for the reason that I used to, not to be noticed, clicked on and discovered…it’s more because I have something to say about the topic or I’m just letting the blogger know that I am in fact reading and appreciate the time they take to write…hopefully making the task less thankless for them just as my regular readers do for me.
A couple of days ago a friend and fellow blogger said, “you’ve got to be on Vinography’s blogroll, that guy has every wine blog there is listed” not in a “you HAVE to be” kind of way, more in a, “that dude has a giant roll” kind of way. I finally got around to checking it out and as I suspected my blog was not listed, makes sense as my blog is not really a traditional wine blog, I was not wounded, didn’t faze me in the least but the thing that struck me? Took me like 30 minutes to even look….why would anyone bother? I mentioned that I was not listed to another blogging friend and he said, “Send him an email, he will link you, he’s a cool guy” but the thing is, why would I want to be a needle in a haystack?
I spent this morning going over some other wine blogs, the big ones, the ones that get the most hits and checked out their rather hefty blogrolls as well, found myself glossing over, just scrolling and not even really looking at the names of my fellow bloggers, this was what I wanted, to be a part of, some long list that people just gloss over? What the hell was I thinking?! Well I can say with all honesty, without one shred of snark, without a doubt that I am thrilled that my silly little blog only shows up on a few other blogs, blogs with manageable blogrolls, (well Tom’s is a tad um…well, long) makes me feel truly selected and very special. I’m perfectly content being an un-famous, un-wine, blogger.
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