The amazing thing is that there are good things out there to read.
While I was reading this , I read a sentence that got me thinking about why the web is both strange and sensible at the same time.
While Mike Johnston (whose is the proprietor of The Online Photographer ) was proposing a simple exercise to improve ones’ photographic skills (and which I should try to follow, one day), he wrote this,:
“If there are, say, 30,000 people reading this (approximately our average daily readership, an astounding fact that still mystifies me), a couple of thousand might think this suggestion is a sound one…”
I think, based only on his writings, that Mike is probably an honest, neither overly conceited nor overly modest, guy who knows quite a bit about his subject (much more so than the average: he had, afterall, been employed in the past as a photography journalist by specialty print magazines) and is very good and entertaining in his writings about said subject. That 30,000 people a day should read his site is a testament to two things. One is that, as we all know, by far the majority of that hugely vast amount of content on the web isn’t really of much interest to anybody else. Even discounting the dumb, evil, or designed-to-disgust content, most of it just isn’t anything special. So good, honest, thoughtful writings by someone who knows something about his subject is bound to, eventually, attract people who appreciate it.
Second is that there are so many people surfing and reading the web that even if this good content is really not gripping enough for most web surfers, the minority who are attracted are still an amazingly sizable chunk of people.
I think I’m making this sound more profound than it is or maybe it’s more profound than I can describe without sounding like a pompous twit (I’m not Mike Johnston, after all). But it does continually amaze me that good people with good skills who may have lost their niche in the analog world find a new one that looks completely different but which enables their skills to be out in the skills-marketplace, so to speak, and attracts the people who are looking for those skills. Even, in this case, if it’s just good writing about photography.
