blogging – Jason likes to travel

Hello dear readers! How are things? I’m coming back at you with another short and sweet blog post that is just a bit of fun, rather than being about any specific trip, but this piqued my interest a little bit.

We all blog for different reasons but personally this is very much a casual hobby for me. You’re not suddenly going to find me dangling off a clifftop and plunging to my death in aim of getting that Instagram-worthy photo that sends me into “influencer” stardom – no thank you!

This is purely enjoyment for me. I’ve been catching up on blog-reading in recent weeks and fellow blogger, Marion, has been sharing details from a trip to Australia which has left me reminiscing of my own trip to Sydney back in 2013.

I wrote about it here and I don’t even know why I’m linking you to the post because it’s so painfully dull to read. I really need to go back and do that trip justice on the blog at some point.

In all fairness it was one of my earliest blog posts but I’d fallen in to that trap of “this is how you’re supposed to travel blog” rather than just finding what worked for me.

I look back at that post and the few before it and not even I care to read those posts! I barely recognise those posts, they could have been written by anyone. One more travel blog amidst a million others.

Suddenly it hit me: an epiphany!

Forget the number of readers, the statistics and everything else; if I was doing this blogging thing, it had to be something that felt genuine. If it doesn’t feel like my own writing or I’m not even enjoying writing about it, why even bother? Right?

That’s not a criticism of anybody else. Different things work for different bloggers and I think it’s important any blogger finds what works for them but I think I realised quite early that my passion for blogging would only survive if I was story-telling in some form. Even if 99% of the time it’s just rambling nonsense.

“So like this post Jason?”
“Exactly!”

As usual, I’m kind of getting sidetracked from the point of the post but blogging is a form of enjoyment for me. It’s not big business, it’s not something I’m putting a bunch of effort into. If I can squeeze out one ramble a week, I’m doing pretty darn good!

I’ve blogged for many years now but my “numbers” are still pretty modest. That’s the result of it being a casual thing and I don’t give those numbers too much attention but every now and then I’ll take a look at the stats and whilst most of the time it’s fairly mundane, occasionally something unusual stands out.

Long term readers may well remember that by chance I’d spotted a while ago that my viewership was stuck on 99 (WordPress) countries so I celebrated with a special blog post dedicated to Libya having helped me reach one hundred countries!

Long term readers may also remember another post revealing my short-lived fame in China where I was randomly inundated with Chinese readers, largely arriving from the search engine Baidu which I’d never heard of.

Well today I dedicate this post to another corner of the world that has surprisingly and inexplicably found my blog. I happened to take a look at my stats the other day and over the last seven days my Japanese viewership has doubled.

I’ve had more views from Japan in the last seven days than I have had in the eight or so years prior to this past week!

More specifically, it seems this influx of Japanese readers were predominantly reading my blog on March 17th – St Patrick’s Day of course!

So fellow readers, have some fun with me! Let’s pretend that it’s not some big coincidence! What have I done to gather such popularity in Japan? I joked in my “fame in China” post that it wouldn’t be long until I owned the most read blog in all of Asia and it has only taken me another five years to make my breakthrough in Japan!

Or perhaps it’s controversy? Does the St Patrick’s Day reading actually mean something!? Maybe my recent blog posts about Ireland, which I noted was rather underwhelming, have caused offence in Japan! Am I about to be overwhelmed by Japanese hate-mail? Should I have infact been more complimentary about Ireland?

Amuse me with any theories you might have! What have I done!? Which area of the globe will I next find such fame? Let me know!

Anyway for now I’ll end with a ありがとう and さようなら.
Thank you and goodbye! (I hope – blame Google for the translation, not me!)

Jason

Hello my dear readers! Look at that, another blog post! Can you believe it!? Perhaps it’s even more shocking that this’ll be a pretty short post compared to my usual standards!

Anyway, I hope your 2025 is off to a decent start and that many good things come your way this year. Of course the best of those things is the realisation that I might actually blog with some frequency this year!

I said in my last post that firstly, it’s incredible that I used to blog weekly! It was a habit and somewhere along the way that habit just stopped. It’s not even necessarily about the time, it’s about wanting to make the time and I just didn’t have that writing mojo behind me.

The other thing I said in my last post is that I was much less present online in 2024. It wasn’t just a WordPress thing but just generally, I didn’t really have much of an online presence anywhere on the same scale that I have in previous years. I’ve been perpetually online for the best part of 25 years but I just find this internet age loathsome.

This has been a lingering feeling of mine for a while and I’ve only recently discovered there’s somewhat of a conspiracy theory dedicated to it known as the “dead internet theory” which partially explains it. I’m not some conspiracy theorist but I’d argue in this case it’s not even a theory, it’s undeniable that the internet has lost that bit of magic about it. That human connection that much of the internet seems to lack now.

The counter-argument might be that I’m just becoming some grumpy, old man. That might be fair but my wings have spread across many a corner of the internet over the years and there’s just a real lack of authenticity and realness to this internet age.

I’ve met some incredible people online over the years but 99% of the internet now is just an advert, advert, bot, bot, spam, advert, actual human spewing hate, bot, bot, advert. Occasionally an actual human being filters through and it’s usually only communication served in self-interest.

“Sign up to my pyramid scheme.”
“I love your blog so much, your painfully average photos are so amazing! Can you subscribe to mine and we’ll never speak again?”

Where are the real people in this internet era? Is it a decreasing minority? I think the greatest thing about the internet is the ability to connect with someone anywhere in the world and it’s something that with more internet users than ever, has somehow become a bigger struggle to find.

Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy but I seem to spend half my time online not even looking at content I want to be looking at before giving up and doing something better with my time. Ultimately it is what it is and I don’t see that changing with the rise of AI and that’s even transcending into blog-writing and content-creating but for me, there’s no substitution for that genuine human connection.

That’s partially a topic for a blog-post on another day but I think somewhere along the way it has been lost that what makes the internet an incredible place is people and what AI will never be able to substitute is that people are imperfect.

Anyway.. this was just kind of a long-winded way of saying that my hopeful solution to my current disdain for the internet is that maybe WordPress is where I should be spending more of my time online.

I was feeling this way already and I’d actually written a large chunk of this post beforehand but the response to my previous blog-post kind of reaffirmed that there is a community here on WordPress and it’s one that I’ve missed. I have much less control on other platforms but here I can write what I like and filter out the spam or mundane interactions that don’t bring me any joy.

Time will tell but hopefully the best of the internet can still be found in this little corner of the web.

Thanks for following, until next time!

Jason

P.S – pictured is me and your modern day, faceless AI travel-blogger (Sydney, February 2013)

Tag: blogging

Yet more fame!