Roll Call Redux

Four years ago, I posted a roll call asking anybody who was passing through DuJane that day to post a comment with as little or as much information as they were willing to share.  It is still the most commented post in my archives, although for awhile, I thought Sarah Palin's Bendy Straws vs the Business End of Van Halen's 747 was going to top it.

Four years ago, I wasn't on Facebook.  I wasn't on Twitter.  I wasn't attending blogging conferences or tweet-ups or internet media events.  I had just started my relationship with Duke and my preferred online dating site of the day did not allow me to post my URL in my profile anyway.  I wasn't racing.  I wasn't jumping onto (and out of) airplanes to meet you all in person.

I didn't even have those cute little square business cards that make everyone go "awwww!"  I had yet to write my URL on a single person in Sharpie marker.

Last night, I had a conversation about this site and lurkers.  It was an eye-opening conversation for me, because the person I was talking to is somebody I met through racing, and the viewpoint she expressed completely lined up with suspicions I've always had about my racing connections and the website.  I've said it a million times, I'll say it again - racers don't comment.  This post is the most popular post in the history of this website, far and away, thousands and thousands of page views more than any other entry I've ever written.  Zero comments.  So I think that I get a little off-kilter in my views of who my readers are and where they come from based on the comment/visitor source imbalance.  I even began last season by parking my butt in the grandstands of a dirt track and then coming here and apologizing for subjecting you all to so much racing talk, though I now suspect that the vast majority of my readers are from the racing world.

In addition to that, I've also had to adjust my views of how comfortable people are in crossing the line between our offline and online identities.  My hockey connections will walk up to me at the MetroCentre and introduce themselves.  My GDT friends will swarm me given the opportunity.  Duke and I were approached at the grocery store once (and even I will concede that the experience was a little odd).  But more than once in the past few weeks, I've gotten an email after a race saying "I saw you at ____ but didn't want to bother you" or I have found out that a lurker recognized me but didn't say hello.  The racing friend even told me that had she never discovered our mutual friends, she likely would have never commented, never emailed, and never spoken to me at the track, even though she was a regular reader.  This isn't something I feel wounded by - I don't expect to meet every person who reads this site.  I am fine being a faceless identity to you.  But my curiosity is piqued, the whos and the hows and the whys of whether I am or ever will be a multi-dimensional person to my visitors, or whether I'd even want to be.

Compounding all of this is my ongoing project to move this site to a different CMS, one with a drastically different commenting system that has the capability to link much more of my online world together, and which will make it much easier for people to comment, reply, and converse here via web, email, SMS, Facebook, or Twitter.  I wonder what impact that will have on the interaction that I have with regular readers, commenters, and lurkers.

And so (you knew where this was going from the very first sentence and I thank you for reading the blomit anyway) I ask you, my readers, friends, family, and lurkers, to step forward for one tiny little second and show me how many of you are out there and willing to say hello.  I can see you all in meaningless numbers - I know your screen resolutions and your browser choices and your google searches.  But I don't know anything meaningful about what connects us.

If you would be so dear, leave me a comment here (not on Facebook, please) with any or all of the following information, which is all optional. 

• Your name, nickname, username, etc, anonymized to whatever level you feel comfortable with.  If you leave the name field blank, it will auto-fill the word "Anonymous".
• E-mail address and website are not required but are welcome.  E-mail address will only be visible to me.  Website will be linked and clickable to everyone who views the comments.
• How did you land here?  Do you know me via racing?  GDT?  Roller derby?  Hockey?  Family?  Music?  Dating site?  Dated?  Were we married?  Random google search for photos of Hannah Montana?  How many sweatshirts have I stolen from you over the course of our relationship?  Again, optional question and whatever level of detail you are comfortable with. 
• If we haven't met yet, would you greet me or introduce yourself if you recognized me offline?  Be honest - I will not take it personally if it's a no.

If you're more comfortable contacting me via email, my address is jane at duchessjane dot com.  Comments on this site that only contain one or two words are often caught by the spam filter, so if you post "hi" and nothing else, it'll likely get rejected.  At least say "Hey there, Duchess, how YOU doin'?" 

I am not sure what I'll do with this information other than marinate in it for awhile.  I won't contact you or call you out - I will let you return to lurkerdom safely, I promise.  I would like to say that it will provide me with some direction for how much I focus on a given topic, whether I scale up or back on the amount of racing babble I post, whether I do more or less broadcasting of my travel schedule, attempt more or fewer F2Fs.  This whole thing is quite fascinating to me - the things that I learn from the experience of having this site have been pretty life-altering, and you're all a part of that whether you ever speak up or not.  My life gets bigger and a little weirder and infinitely more beautiful every day.  I am figuring out all of this as I go along, and with every new move I make in life, I find myself examining how DuJane fits into it, and vice versa.  Your feedback helps me sort it all out.

Thanks in advance.  Bring it on.