My Goal for This Year

I was listening to the latest House of PUNTE the other day, and he had on Sarah Sprague of Black and Gold Tchotchkes, a Pittsburgh Steeler fan/football food blog and regular commenter at one of PUNTE/Josh Zerkle's main sites, KSK. She said something that really resonated with me as a blogger. When asked why she wrote a "foodie"/sports blog, she said that she wanted to stand out, that everyone wrote opinion blogs and she wanted to have her own angle. That made me think, "What's my angle? What makes me stand out?" I didn't really have an immediate answer. Sure, I do the instant feedback thing every Monday, and I do GraphJams every once in awhile, but it took me a few minutes to really get a handle on what I was doing with this bandwidth.

Finally, I came up with an answer that really worked, and that's that I sort of look at the wrestling in the ring more than anything else, which on reflection is nominally true at the very least. I do like to watch for the actual in-ring product more than anything else, which is why I kinda give ROH a pass for its spotty booking unless the crowd is overrun by snotty kids, why I really love Chikara and why I seem to be less critical of the WWE than your average Internet smark.

So, what is the point of this post other than... well, nothing? (I can hear it now, "GET TO THE GD POINT HERE, TH!"). Well, it's twofold. One, I'd like to get some feedback. I recently hit the 1,000 post point, so I think this is as good a time as any to gauge what you, the readers, think (I do still have readers, right? RIGHT?). Two, I'd like to share with you my goal for the rest of the year and for the rest of the tenure of this blog, my plan to really embrace what I think makes me stand out from the other wrestling blogs, and that is workrate.

So going in reverse order, here's my goal for the year. I'm going to watch as much wrestling action as I can, critique as much of it, really go through it and analyze it and review it here, whether it's stuff as it happens like on RAW, PPV or at live events, or on DVD in varying degrees of the past. I want to see as much PWG and Chikara and the like on DVD and try to piece together as much of their wrestling year as I can so that my year-end lists and awards have this sort of basis of knowledge that's as complete as possible. I want to open my mind to more indie feds than what I'm watching now, be they local like JAPW or remote like NWA Anarchy or F1RST.

Basically, when I give you my worker of the year or my A1W 100 ballot or my top 25 matches for the year list (hint, I'm keeping track of all the matches I really, really like in this thread at A1), I want to be as authoritative as I can. I don't know if I'll do it or not, but I'll try damn hard. I just ordered PWG's As the Worm Turns today, and any week that I can, I'll be ordering a DVD and asking for mostly wrestling DVDs for Christmas and my birthday this year. I'm pretty serious about this.

Of course, I'm not going to stop doing the other stuff. Reposting news, cracking wise about the industry or certain wrestlers, doing the features that I do, continually writing about Danielson stopping just short at writing fan fics picking out Youtubes and pictures and the like? I do that because it's fun, and if there ever comes a day when blogging isn't fun, then I'll probably shut down. However, I want to have a focus. I want to be able to go on podcasts and shit and be able to tell someone why my blog is different than all the other pro wrestling blogs out there.

And in order to improve for the future, I need to know how I've done in the past and present to know what I need to fix and what I'm doing right. So, you, the readers (if you're out there, and I hope to God that you are), I need you to answer just a few questions for me:

1 - Why do you read my blog?

2 - What do you like most?

3 - What areas do I need to improve?

(Note, for #3, I will not be taking "you need to like Triple H/Vince Russo/Dixie Carter/whoever more" as valid criticism.)

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography

Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!