My daughter, the blogger, not liking the numbers

Yesterday was a gloomy day in the publishing empire that is our household.

It wasn't the newspaper I edit, The St. Louis American - we put to bed a big fat strong paper shortstaffed on deadline.

It wasn't my book publishing ambitions - after more than a year of inactivity, an old friend recently showed interest in helping my novel find a home.

It wasn't my dwindling freelance business - after months with no sidework, I landed an assignment from Rolling Stone to write about Chad Channing, the Nirvana drummer before Dave Grohl who has a great debut record coming out in June.

It wasn't my blogs - I am having fun with them, and for whatever reason people are reading them, more than I expected.

The problem was with the new blog in the family, the baby blog, my daughter's blog.

She asked to start one when we were in Los Angeles last month on a working vacation. Not something I would have chosen for her to do at age six, but I didn't mind helping her set one up. I didn't see any reason not to add a stat counter to track her visitors.

Then I made what is starting to look like a bad call. I explained the stat counter and showed her how to see how many people had looked at her blog and even where they live. She really got a kick out of that, like pretty much every other blogger.

Then, alas, she started to worry about her numbers.

"Daddy, how many people looked at my blog today?"

This is not such a horrible question to ask when there have been ten visitors, even seven. She is discouraged, sure. It doesn't help that our blogs are linked on Stat Counter and she can see on the bar graph how many, many more visitors my blogs got that day.

But even ten visitors is something to go on, even seven. Even five.

But yesterday was a bad day.

"Daddy, how many people looked at my blog today?"

I looked at the blog. Then, I looked at the stat counter.

There had only been one visitor: me. Her dad.

Of course, that is how it should be. There are just not that many compelling reasons for anyone other than her family members to follow the blog of a six year old girl.

But, still, that's my kid, and she is watching her numbers, so I figured I should post something up here about her blog and see if she wins over any new readers.