Freshly Pressed AND Mauled By A Polar Bear On The Same Day

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Has anything in the blogosphere ever created as much angst and envy as “Freshly Pressed?”

Folks, we’ve got to stop obsessing about Freshly Pressed. Consider the following from WordPress.com News:

WordPress.com bloggers published 39,705,625 posts in January . . . “and we featured 190 of them on Freshly Pressed.”

Think of it. McDonald’s hamburgers, billions sold! Blog posts, millions and millions! Freshly Pressed, 190 in January.

Numbers, large or small, boggle my mind. I should have paid more attention in arithmetic.

This much is obvious:  It’s reached the point that a single ordinary blogger has a better chance of being struck by lightning than being featured on Freshly Pressed. (“Lightning” is such a cliché.)

A single, ordinary blogger has a far greater chance of being mauled by a polar bear AND winning a Pulitzer Prize on the same day, than of being featured on Freshly Pressed. I haven’t calculated what the odds are for a married, ordinary blogger.

The odds weren’t always so long. When I started blogging, back in 2007, WordPress bloggers and posts were counted in the hundreds of thousands. Now they’re counted in the millions.

Back in the day, even simple, ordinary blogs like mine sometimes turned up on Freshly Pressed. Not that my blog deserved such recognition; it was unaccountable. I think they simply picked mine out of a hat. Now, they pick them out of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Get over it. Most of us are about as likely to land on Freshly Pressed as we are to complete AND publish a novel.

What we need is to keep a positive attitude. For instance, if we put a million bloggers in the same room, pecking away on word processors at the same time, we would eventually write a bestseller. Maybe. That much is obvious.

— John Hayden

9 thoughts on “Freshly Pressed AND Mauled By A Polar Bear On The Same Day”

  1. Agreed. I think when it becomes an obsession, people intentionally write content that they expect to get picked for FP and then get upset when it doesn’t. They don’t just write for the joy of writing, they have an ambitious goal that is going to take away from the purity of it. However, if anything I write happens to get picked — well, I’m going out that very moment to buy a lottery ticket.

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  6. Pingback: Monday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion | Clarissa's Blog

  7. If one of your posts got picked for “Freshly Pressed”, how would you know?
    And how would you know if there is anything interesting there anyway?
    All the lings that used to help you find interesting blog posts are dead. Technorati still exists, but no longer helps you find interesting blog posts — they TELL you what THEY think you should read. MyBlogLog was taken over by Yahoo and dumped. Now there’s only serendipity and one’s own blogroll, and perhaps announcements on Facebook and Twitter.

    My e-mail address is shayes@dunelm.org.uk

    WordPress won’t allow me to enter it, as when I do it tells me I am not logged in. I have lo0gged in three times, so it must have a bug.

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    • You raise good points. I think Freshly Pressed is mostly invisible, except to people in the WordPress “community” where it is very visible. WordPress has been focusing on improving the WordPress Reader. On the Reader, you can see posts from all the WordPress blogs you’ve subscribed to, and there’s a prominent link to Freshly Pressed.

      Freshly Pressed used to be THE center of WordPress, but not anymore. Note that you don’t have to be a WordPress blogger to get access to the Reader. People who are readers but not bloggers can sign up for a WordPress account. If you’re logged in to WordPress (I stay logged in all the time), when you surf to WordPress. com, the Reader comes up.

      Sorry that’s longwinded, but I hope it helps.

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