The site appears to have grown significantly more popular this month. Not sure how to account for it – as usual, the bulletin board is the most popular feature and the most popular search term that guides people in. I had a very funny moment during the run of Much Ado About Nothing when one of the actresses realized – after six weeks of rehearsal and two weeks of performances – that I was the guy who ran the website that had led her to the audition. She said she’s had it bookmarked in her browser for months.
Still, these blog posts effectively never generate any comments, and I imagine it’s partly because I added a couple of hoops to thwart all those very determined spambots; and it’s probably also because I don’t often blog argumentatively or through any current events lens. Even if there’s something that I fancy could be a conversation-starter, there aren’t any people hanging around here looking for a conversation.
My acting profile does seem to be growing, and there are a number of writing initiatives that, while I would not jinx them by detailing, do seem to be bringing me ever-closer to that elusive Hollywood payday/greenlight. So I have wanted to add a little flair to the Acting and Writing pages on the site, but have yet to really delve into how.
I don’t know what version we’re on of this site by now; my web presence has evolved from LiveJournal to BlogSpot to here, with a cameo on FreeWebs plus some truly eye-stabbing old-school GeoCities action back in the day. And the whole idea of a “presence”, which I guess serves as a synonym for the “personal brand” all us creative types are encouraged to cultivate via Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, is both mindbendingly odd but somehow natural enough that a whole generation has seemingly absorbed the idea one day at a time. I guess personal brand used to mean just whose band’s T-shirt you wore. We certainly have evolved.
Still, if the bulletin board remains the most visited and recognized feature (far more so than my face and name), I am still happy about that; because it means I fulfilled a goal of creating something useful to the community of local stage actors. I guess our “presence” is how we find our community and start figuring out our role in it.