Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Matthew Churchill is Freakin' Awesome!

The heading of this post is unlikely to make much sense to anybody. It's actually part of an experiment I'm conducting - I'll explain a bit more as the experiment progresses over the next week. For a partial explanation, "Matthew Churchill" is my nom-de-blog that I used to register my blogs on Technorati. As should be obvious to everybody, I've chosen to do both this blog and my YouTube videos sort of anonymously. I say sort of because despite the fact I don't use my real name, I wear a mask and I minimise identifying details; that only works with somebody who doesn't already know me.

I don't think a stranger on the street would recognise me in passing, even if they were a regular reader/viewer. But I'd always assumed that anyone who knew me would pick me straight away. This was proved true at lunch yesterday when my boss happened to glance over my shoulder while I was on a YouTube page that showed my masked visage. She only saw it for about a nanosecond but she instantly said "Oh, is that you playing silly buggers?" The answer to which, of course, is yes.

Matthew Churchill is not the only fake name I've used online in an attempt to throw people off the trail but, because it's on Technorati, it's my most prominent false identity. And getting more prominent by the day! I am just outside the top 20,000 in Technorati, I think it will take about 3 more links to cross that particular line. It was just back in June that I was still outside the top 100,000 so huge thanks to everyone for your support. The funny thing is, so far as I can tell, this ranking means pretty much nothing. I've never seen a single referral from Technorati in my logs so this remains a shallow obsession with no real purpose. It might come in handy as an indicator of value if I try to make money out of this blog.

I am very close to a few other milestones as well. I have just passed 6 full months of blogging with at least one post every day - I'm halfway to my goal of being angry 365 days a year. Within the next week I should reach 300 posts on this blog and I'll also most likely be posting my 100th YouTube video. These numbers are all a bit freaky when I look at them. Very inconsequential in the big scheme of things but 6 months ago I had no idea if I'd ever reach this stage.

At both 100 and 200 posts I set myself a challenge for the next hundred and in both cases I've met that personal challenge. All of which makes me think I'm being too easy on myself. I'll have to put a bit of thought into the goal I set myself to reach before post 400. Make it a "stretch" goal as annoying managers are prone to say in annual performance reviews. Maybe I should aim to actually make some money out of all this work. Arguably, I've already done this. Last time I looked there was more than $9 in my Revver account!

Another achievement/piece of trivia I've learned in the past week: apparently, I've been on TV in the Netherlands. One of my YouTube subscribers sent me a message saying that he saw a story about YouTube on one of the local channels and it featured about 10-20 seconds of one of my videos. I wish I had a copy of that; call me childish but I think it would be funny to hear a Dutch voice talking over one of my videos. Very Monty Python.

So I'm being happy again rather than angry. It's all your damn fault! Yes you, the readers! I hope you're satisfied, because you are so dedicated and provide such enjoyable dialogue this bloody blog makes me happy all the time! My life is a constant struggle. I'll have to make up for that later by posting a particularly angry news bulletin.

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