Sometimes I get a bit surprised by the stats on this site. Well, not the stats about site visits and unique viewers and all of that. Those are usually way over-inflated by paid trollers in Central Asia looking for weak code or unmonitored comment sections to exploit (or even unpaid trollers in the US just looking to direct traffic to their spam site through links in the admin section of WordPress). The stats that surprise me are the Facebook and Twitter shares. I mean, 40-50 shares on Facebook is not going to set the world on fire, but it is a huge number considering that I have almost no promotion for this site (it doesn’t have its own FB page, or Twitter account, or anything like that). I rarely share my posts (I know, bad blogger) and only a handful of friends post my stuff on FB, so I usually can’t account for 90% of those shares. That’s pretty crazy cool.

So to those sharing my posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other places – I thank you sincerely.

The only thing I don’t like is that I have no idea why those posts are being shared and I can’t be a part of the conversation that may or may not result from those shares. That is just the name of the game with Facebook and other sites – the conversations surrounding what you write are still as disconnected from the original author as they were back in the day of editorials in newspapers.

That is not to say that I want you to stop doing it – please continue to feel free to share. I would love to hear how the conversation goes, if at all possible. Maybe you could look at the comments section as kind of a “letters to the editor” section? Just come here and let me know how the conversation is going? Or ask me any questions. Or challenge something that you think is off (there’s a good chance you will be right).

So again I say, thank you for sharing the posts as far and wide as you have. I would love to be a part of the conversation in any way you think would work (although I rarely accept FB friend requests from people I don’t know). And sorry to the trollers out there if I don’t click on all the links you leave in the comments. Some of you are very nice in how you tell me you love my site. But I’m not going to approve your comments just to generate hits to your free Xanax site or Rollex knock-off website 🙂

Oh, and again to the 20 million unapproved commentators on the Rick Warren post – like I said before, thank you for helping me clear up the context of the quote (your comments really did help me learn something). That has already been taken care of, but again – the context of the quote was not the point of the post 🙂