I am a novice organic farmer and have learned that it is very difficult to predict how my crops will develop. A few months ago I planted a row of corn, several of the seeds grow fast and in no time offered sweet corn, while others lingered and some did not develop at all. I have no way of figuring out why this happened, they all get a similar amount of water, sunlight and nourishing soil. The same happened with the watermelons I grow earlier in the summer, a few became huge and ended up being very sweet while others remained pink and did not achieve that deep red color of a wonderfully sweet watermelon and ended up as food for the local goats and horses. What does this have to do with new media? Actually I find a similar behavior with the traffic on our site. We see a growing number of visitors but for some reason (which I don’t fully understand yet) some articles are getting hundreds of visits while others linger with little attention from our audience. For my organic gardening I turn o the local framers and seek advice, and once in a while they visit my garden and give me some tips on plant rotation, time of year to plant extra. For web traffic we turn to SEO experts or as I call our expert algorithm influencers. As their job is to influence the all mighty Google algorithm to notice our little site and spread the word. I still can’t fully figure out why so many people preferred the story about Ronaldo to that about Beckham or why the story about the semi finals of the Australian Football League was so much more popular then the report about the finals. I guess that jus like gardening the only way to figure this out is time and a lot of trial and error.
