Hello Finland!

By Rory McClannahan

When I was in junior high school, I signed up with something during class to get a pen pal. I was soon matched up with a girl in Australia and we exchanged a few letters and school photos.

The letters we would write took weeks to arrive. I’m not sure which one of us was the last to write, but usually communication between the two of us would take about two months. In hindsight, that does seem like a lot of time to hear from someone, especially when I could, as I sit here, have a direct chat with most anyone in the world. Instantly.

I know my kids and those of their age roll their eyes, connectivity is something they very much take for granted. Each day, they both game and chat with people from all over the world. What’s the big deal? They can’t conceive of anything but instant communication, while a part of me is still amazed by it. I grew up in a world where anything ordered by mail would take 4 to 6 weeks for delivery and a long distance phone call was cost prohibitive.

That I can write an essay every week and post it online to be read by anyone who wishes to is nothing short of a miracle. And when I check the analytics on my postings, I become even more amazed. I know I sound a little like someone who is just now learning all that the internet can do. I’m not. I’ve been looking at analytics for websites I’ve run for nearly 20 years.

Still, I can’t help but be fascinated about someone in Tuusula, Finland who has read everything on this little website of mine. It’s the same with another someone in Falkenstein, Germany. They aren’t the only ones who seem to be regular readers here, but the rest of them I can kind of figure out who they are. I mean, I have friends in Colorado and the Carolinas. Even someone in Ashburn, Virginia reading my stuff is not that surprising.

It should be noted that it is not difficult to find me online. A quick search shows my Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as links to my books on Amazon. There’s also a bunch of stuff from my newspaper career, including a citation in Encyclopedia.com taken from an interview with Barry McGuire. He’s the guy who wrote and sang “Eve of Destruction” back in the 1960s. That newspaper work also resulted in being cited in a few academic articles which, oddly enough, the University of Miami has listed in its library system. I’ve also been cited in a few Wikipedia articles.

This blog, however, is not listed. Apparently, when I set it up, I neglected to turn on the search engine allowance. It is now, but, seriously, how does someone from Finland track down rorymcclannahan.com? I post the link to these weekly essays on Facebook and that’s about it.

I know some of you out there might be thinking that I’m not doing a very good job in marketing myself, in assuring my brand becomes ubiquitous. Truth is, I don’t care about that stuff much anymore. When that becomes important – and it is if you are trying to build a career in the media – you end up spending a lot of your time focusing on marketing and branding. I’d rather just write; I find it to be more interesting.

Still, sometimes odd things happen. Several years ago, I got an email from Amazon telling me that a substantial amount had been deposited in my bank account for royalties. I immediately logged on to find out what was going on. Was I suddenly becoming popular?

Turned out that someone in Great Britain had written a nice review of my time traveling book on their blog and it resulted in several sales. It was surprising, and made for a nice Christmas for the kids that year, but I didn’t do anything else to capitalize on that little bit of good publicity.

So, when I started this blog, I mostly just saw it as a way to throw my writing out into the public for my friends to read. I have no expectations of monetizing this, nor do I really care. I know I’m not provocative enough to garner much in the way of clicks. Besides, who just reads anymore? You’ll never find any funny videos here, nor will you find my takes on Donald Trump, cancel culture, Middle East conflicts, or any life hacks.

To see that someone in Tuusula, Finland has been reading my stuff is flattering. So much so that I went over to Google Maps and took a look at the place. It’s apparently somewhat of a suburb of Helsinki, and the street views show a lovely little municipality. Granted, the street view photos were taken in some time other than winter, but it still looked like a nice place to live.

By this time, anyone who knows anything about how the internet works is thinking to themselves that I’m just a fool. The article views from Finland are probably just bots on my site mining for information it can sell to someone else that will result in targeted Ikea ads or something similar.

In truth, I think the same thing, but we live in cynical times. So, I hold onto the slight belief that there is someone in Finland and Germany and Ashburn, Virginia that somehow saw something of mine and liked it. Hopefully, I can encourage you folks to leave a note in the comments of this essay or shoot me an email.

The thing about writing is that it is mostly meaningless without readers. Back in the journalist days, I used to get a slight thrill when someone would stop me at the store and comment on something they read in the paper.

Hey, I have an ego just like anyone else and who doesn’t like acknowledgement of a job well done. So, yeah, readers in Finland and Germany? Pretty damn cool.