Milestones

If someone had asked me a year ago did I think I’d be posting 400 videos to YouTube I would have said “Of course not, do I look that stupid?” Well, apparently I am that stupid. I never would have imagined that I’d get so much enjoyment out of putting so much work into something for which I get no direct reward. Yet.

To qualify, I don’t actually think it’s a stupid thing to do. I enjoy and get fulfilment out of blogging and making videos. So every time I get stupid comment along the lines of “you don’t have a life” it makes me laugh. These clueless individuals seem to be suggesting that I should do less of what I enjoy because it doesn’t conform to their narrow perception of what makes a life.

I’ll tell you this for free: I’d rather be the person who spends hours creating things, even if it seems to be for no purpose, than the fucker who wastes five minutes passing a negative judgement on someone else’s creation. Now that is a wasted life.

Anyway, 400 videos isn’t my only milestone for my video making. It looks like I’ll be hitting both a thousand subscribers and a million video views on YouTube soon. All without being featured. I know I’ve complained before about not being featured on YT but I’ve got to the point where I’m OK with it.

I’ve seen people get absolutely hammered with tens of thousands of abusive messages after being featured. To say it’s a mixed blessing is putting it mildly. And this way I feel a sense of ownership over my achievements (modest as they are) on YT. So without further ado, here’s my 400th YouTube video. And I remembered to announce the t-shirt competition winner as well – you’ll have to watch through to about the 15 minute mark to find out.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDSwbowdM7g

OK, just in case you aren’t in a position to watch the video, the winner was LadySadist for “Anger is the body’s natural defence against stupid.”

While on the subject of milestones, I’ve been extraordinarily happy with the progress I’ve made on this blog. I passed 600 posts recently and I've had two posts reach the top of Reddit in the last couple of months, as well as getting some prominence on Digg and StumbleUpon. It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I was celebrating a quarter of a million views in a little over a year and then I shot past half a million in about a month. And 1/10 of all of my views in the last 18 months come from a single day!

Damn, the internet is weird.

I’ve passed a number of milestones with the rather artificial measuring stick of my Technorati ranking as well. I say artificial because it doesn’t seem to mean anything. It certainly doesn’t drive any referrals to the blog. Even if it’s totally meaningless, I was still excited when I got into their top 10,000. Now I’m inside their top 8,000 with over 500 referring links according to their figures.

And I still haven’t earned a damn cent from any of it. OK, that isn’t strictly true. I have made money doing stuff for The Fizz, and although that’s technically outside of both the blog and YouTube I never would have had the opportunity if I had been out there doing stuff already. That said, I think it’s about time I got serious about this shit.

I have a major plan underway at the moment. I’m planning a significant event with some other people for later in the year. Stay tuned for more details. The time is soon coming when you’ll be able to say “Oh, Mr Angry? I was into him way before he was famous.”