Community Counts

This Localism Contest has me thinking a lot about community. Posting everyday about our states, counties, cities, towns, businesses, neighborhoods and streets really reinforces my belief that community counts, and extends beyond our personal borders and isn't always physically local.

Gayle Rich-Boxman posted about feeling guilty for not posting and embedded a Who video. We exchanged emails and memories (shared yet separate). All of a sudden FishHawk Lake wasn't so far away. I posted about kindergarten and janeAnne in Asheville responded that she taught school there! janeAnne asked for more information after reading my story about the property on Blanton Branch here in Sylva. Her buyer comes next month to look at horse property. Sheila Newton posts appealingly about Greenville, SC places and events (less than 2 hours away). So, sometime in October we are shooting for a ...well... a photo shooting day together. Tammy Lankford is a little farther away, but we can tell from our email exchanges and phone conversations that when we meet in person (and we will) there will be no lags in the conversation. Cyndi Daves is in Murphy, the next time I go to a John C Campbell Folk School festival, I'll call and see if she has time for a mini meet up.

Will Hamm posted that he broke away from work...again!...and visited San Diego. He met Russel Ray and Jim Frimmer. I'd love to do the same thing and see if photographer guru, William Johnson was available.

Mentioning everyone in the AR community that I want to meet would cause me to go over the maximum suggested number of words!

Which leads me to ActiveRain staffer, Bob Stewart. He’s responsible for some of those great ActiveRain webinars and it seems he’s from Detroit too. Bob also answer questions. The more you learn, the more you question! After attending RainCamp Online and listening to Katerina Gossett discuss Statistics, comments, clicks and views - I wrote Bob to find out the difference between clicks and views! His email arrived at midnight:39!  "Views are really not worth anything. It just means that your content displayed somewhere on a page. It could mean that it was never actually seen though.....like if it was showing at the bottom of your blog page, but someone was only reading the post at the top. Ignore it really.
Clicks is what you are interested in. That means the specific URL of the blog post was loaded on a browser. That is the number you want to pay attention to as that means that someone had a specific blog post of yours loaded on their browser. Generally that number will settle around 50-100 after the first two or three days. Everything after that point is folks who are finding the post via the search engines (or the majority of the traffic after the first few days).
Clicks is what counts."

Now, I get it!

Before I leave (you'll like this Gayle!)... Flash mobs have always interested me because they really show community in action.  At the end of the day, after all ... "Community Counts".