Does traffic matter?

Yes - but only if getting lots of traffic (or visitors to your blog) is your primary objective.

'Baby Talk' is just one of 62.2 million blogs being tracked by leading blog search engine Technorati. And this number is steadily growing. That's a hell of a lot of people around the world tapping away on their PCs and laptops.

Many of us are doing it simply for fun, or for creative expression, some are doing it for commercial benefit.

You can put any blog url into Technorati's search facility and see how that blog ranks - largely based on how many other blogs have chosen to link to it. The top 100 ranked bloggers are known as 'A listers' and some people's main mission as a blogger appears to be to break into this elite club. 'A list' blogs I enjoy reading include Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, PostSecret and Treehugger. If you want to keep up with a range of blogs you need a newsreader such as Bloglines to alert you to new posts in your chosen blogs.

Put 'Baby Talk' into Technorati and you'll find that it's currently ranked at 2,291,044 and no other bloggers have chosen to link here - yet. Being a guy, I'm not averse to a bit of competition, so I'd love to see my blog climb up the chart. However, rankings are not everything and are certainly not my main motivation. I spent 20 minutes this morning talking to my sister Wicki in Denmark - free of charge thanks to Skype - and she told me just how much she enjoys reading about my new family's adventures.

So, I do have at least one avid reader and her feedback, combined with the satisfaction I get from doing this, is enough justification for me.

Actually I have a few more than one. At the top left of this blog you can click on the Sitemeter button and find out who's been visiting. In addition to the UK and Europe, I've had visitors from California, Alaska, New South Wales and South Africa - some of them have even come back! Quite a few of my regular visitors I can identify as family, friends and colleagues. Other than those in Denmark, I don't know who the overseas visitors are. Do they stumble across this blog by chance? do they know me or Liz from somewhwere? are they looking for stuff about parents and babies?

If you're reading this blog I'd love to hear from you. You can leave comments at the end of any post or you can email me at myzornis@yahoo.co.uk

If you're a fellow blogger please consider linking to here. Oh, and if you happen to be an 'A lister' do give me a plug.