On the power of blogging

Quico who has more patience than me with PSF literature noticed that Venezuelanalysis was asking for donations, concluding this as yet another sign of financial trouble in the chavista camp. This far I agree with him but I would have liked him to go a little bit further in his observations. I will thus pick where he left.

First, his picture is not as comprehensive as I would have liked it to be so I took my own shot, to make sure a date was recorded and to remind folks that a site who has published books out of its contents should be important enough not to have to request money. Heck, they should ask Eva Golinger and Ignacio Ramonet how it is done!!!! As far as I am concerned Greg Wilpert is at least as good as these two creeps, and way more civil than either one. I know because I was on radio with him once and exchanged courteous mails about links (I was the lone oppo blog to link to chavista sites for a long while; but that's me). Click on pic for details.

However it does get much better when you click on the links offered and read the info on why they seek help. I quote:

we have recently lost the support of some of our principal donors.

After so many years of speculation about the funding sources for V-analysis, we would love to know those mysterious donors so affected by the current recession. I mean, actual capitalist business were sponsoring that site? Because, you know, we are told that PDVSA has no problems, from the very articles of V-analysis. What gives?

The next one is even better and gives the oppo blogosphere in English enough excuse to pat each other's back.

In its six years of existence, we have managed to steadily increase our readership, so that now over 40,000 people (“unique visitors,” according to Google Analytics) visit the site per month.

Let me see if I get this right: with sponsors and many writers V-analysis did not manage to double my number of unique visitors, a number that I acquired on my own, writing alone except for the occasional guest post when I travel and did not own yet a lap top? Yes, that is right, be it Google analytics or the other counters on my site I get between 20 and 30K unique readers every month (1).

Furthermore from the google reference section I can guess what Miguel or Quico get based on what hits they send my way. I can assure readers that the combined sum of us can be the envy of V-analysis. And let's not even recall Alek who in his heyday had more victors than the rest of us combined, and by far.

To nail it all the way through, oppo blogs do not hide their stance and thus willingly or not filter their readership. V-analaysis pretends to be more objective and tries to attract potential opposition readership. Though they do it clumsily, according to this quote from the same fund asking letter:

Venezuelanalysis has regularly been the first place for people to visit for accurate, contextualized, and in-depth reporting from on the ground on crucial developments in Venezuela, whether on its many electoral contests, on Venezuela’s social movements, on the Venezuelan government’s innovative domestic and foreign policies, on opposition and media efforts to discredit and destabilize the Bolivarian Process, and on breaking news, among many other topics.

How many contradictions can you pick from this paragraph? Are these innocent contradictions or are they fishing in troubled waters?

Anyway, a few weeks ago I tested this blog unwillingly for donations to Globovision and to my great surprise I could have raised easily, very easily several thousand dollars. Yes, maybe you could argue that I have a rich right wing reader base, though you would be hard pressed to prove it so, but the fact of the matter is that the only payment I got for my years of work has been the occasional lunch from a grateful reader. Not even a paid for invitation to a conference, as many of V-analysis writers I am sure got.

I leave it up to the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

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1) this hits numbers are very hard to evaluate as to their real meaning. Many are accidental arrivals from search engines, many are unique every week, etc, etc... Even the "stay on a page" number is not definitive to establish how many people actually read one blog.

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