Here's another take on the new Buzz ranking snafu/brouhaha. The only way I know how to deal with these things is to tell a personal story.

I was never a popular kid. EVER. My blog has never been a popular blog. I have maybe 30 people in my RSS reader and the bulk of the hits I get to my blog are for people searching for something called Red Monkey jeans (some hipster $300 nightmare denims). So the fact that I get 200-300 hits a day is, well, pretty darn skewed. I get hit mostly for those jeans and random image searches - and the Jeremy Lavine essays, NOT for my own work. I get, at best, 2 comments on a post. Most of the time, I get 0 comments.

It's frustrating. But I blog mostly for myself and I have fun doing it. I'm not really caught up in the numbers game, feverishly marketing my blog. That's just not me.

My blog posts tend to be long and attention spans on Los InterWebz tends to be short. So, I'm never going to be a popular blogger. I accept that. But accepting that fact doesn't mean that watching my hits drop doesn't make me sad. It does.

It's also depressing to write some of the posts I write and get no response at all. I know people read it, I can see that in my stats. Okay, some of what I write is just hard stuff ... people probably read it, pondered and moved on.

Sometimes I go to other people's blogs and see them getting 30+ comments per post and it just boggles my mind. A lot of times I don't add my comment - they don't need me, they've got plenty of other voices.

When I first got to the Buzz, at first I ignored the rankings. Eventually, my competitive side jumped in and I started "working the system" - reading Antman's tips about how the rankings worked and trying really hard to boost my rank. I have had a few days up in the top 8 spot on the homepage and I was ecstatic. I had one of my pieces of art hit the top 8 and I was beyond thrilled.

But the deal is this: I'm ultimately a pretty quiet person socially. Even online I really have to gear myself up to go to new people's profiles and leave even the "Howdy, welcome to the buzz" kinds of comments. It doesn't come naturally to me at all.

And the kind of social butterfly-ing it takes to market my own art or writing? Fuggetaboutit. It's too artificial to me and I just can't bring myself to do it, anymore than I can play the SEO and linky-love game just to up my Technorati stats or my TTLB eco-system status. In fact, that reminds me. I need to take that damn widget off my site. It's too depressing.

At Cre8 I went from teens to 148 in overall ranking. Not nearly the big spanking that other folks got, but a shocking one to me nonetheless. My community ranking went from Xers and I duking it out for #1 to #4. One of those guys last logged in near the end of March. The #2 ranked guy last logged in at the end of January.

Seeing that is disheartening to say the least.

To be honest, most of the ranking system is, and will always be, a popularity system. That's what ranking always is and I'm not sure that can be changed. It's human nature to vote your friends high and your enemies low.

So to attempt to make the rankings more fluid is certainly a good thing in general. It's an attempt to break the popularity mold. And that's good.

But it also means a LOT more schmoozing around the site. That's good for Cre8Buzz ... but it's not good for me. Not only does it take a lot of energy on my part, it takes a LOT of time. Particularly frustrating when we're still seeing far too much of the White Screen of Death or days when the site is just really really slow to load.

And, as Pandora has pointed out on the forum over at Antman's, it seems to negate past effort and contributions.

For me, I don't have enough thoughts in my head to hold down the Red Monkey blog and a full blog here. I put teasers here, I put tidbits here, I put things I don't fully want to share on my main blog here since it's kinda-sorta hidden from my real life name and I'm searching for a job.

I came here originally to promote Red Monkey while at the same time hanging out and chatting with friends - most of whom I met here. Apparently I got caught up in the excitement of seeing my blog start to get "popular." To see it fall from around 30 to 1599 has depressed me beyond belief. I guess it's just time to give up the dream of seeing a high ranking. I don't have the time or energy to learn the new algorithm and do all of that work all over again - particularly not every few days.

I'll just slip back into obscurity again. I'm more comfortable there anyway.