If you mouse over the blogroll links on the left sidebar of this blog, comments appear. Roll your mouse over the link to Bike Snob NYC, for example, and you get this: “A smug bicyclist makes fun of smug bicyclists.”
So anyway, I have a friend who reads my blog. I know this because he often tells me on Facebook he likes this entry or that entry. He’s also a bicyclist; in fact it was he who first introduced me to Bike Snob NYC. I thought he’d get a chuckle over my sarcastic mouse-over comment, so I told him to check it out.
He messaged me: “Where do I find it?” At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Find what?”, I messaged back. “Your blog,” he replied.
And the wind spilled right out of my sails. All this time he’s been reading my blog and he doesn’t know how to find it? He doesn’t have it bookmarked? Who else doesn’t know? Does anyone know?
The fault, I realize, is mine. I post links to individual blog entries on Facebook. Many of my regular readers come here via those Facebook links. They click the link, read the entry, then hit the back arrow to return to Facebook. Nothing wrong with that, of course … except that they never see my entire blog and may not know what else is on it.
I follow links to other peoples’ blog entries all the time. After reading the post at the link, if I decide I’d like to read more of what that blogger has to say, I know to click on the blog’s title at the top of the screen to see the entire blog. It’s the same thing as clicking the “home” button on a regular website. If it’s a worthy blog I bookmark it and come back to it again and again.
I guess I assumed if I knew how to do that everyone else knew it too. But maybe they don’t! I think I’ll quit posting Facebook links that take readers directly to individual blog articles. Instead, I’ll leave a one-sentence summary of the entry and just post the link to the blog itself. Don’t know if anyone will stick around or bother to bookmark it, but at least they’ll see the entire blog, not just a single entry.
Last year there was a flurry of “people don’t understand how to use the internet” articles after a website protesting some new Facebook privacy policy somehow slipped into first place in the Google rankings for “Facebook.” Hundreds of people left outraged comments on the website, all on the order of “Why isn’t this stupid fucking thing working, where is my Facebook?” and “What have you done to Facebook, this sucks.” Except stupider, and with more misspellings. They’d been getting to Facebook through Google, apparently not knowing how to go straight there or how to bookmark it once they’d found it.
We have an elderly friend who visits from time to time. When he wants to get his boarding pass for the Southwest flight home, he sits down at our computer, calls up Google, types “AOL” into the search bar, then gets to Southwest’s site through AOL. It’s all I can do to keep from beating him with a stick.
I wonder if they’re teaching a unit on navigating the internet in middle school? If they aren’t, they should be. And then once our generation dies off, everyone who’s left will know all this stuff!