What I want to do here

I've been silent for the last couple of months. Well, if you ignore the frequent tinkering with the website itself and the new addition to it: ads.

It's been consistently hard to sit down and write. Before all of this started I promised myself that I would write daily articles, pumping out charts and stats. It seemed so easy in my mind, to sit down early in the morning or late at night and just write.

It turns out it's a lot harder to stick to a routine. After all, writing is a craft like any other, and if it's to be taken seriously, it needs to be practised daily. In case of this website, that's been really hard for me, mainly for two reasons.

What to write about?

The thought crossed my mind, or I was finally frank with myself, and was able to fish it out from my mind: What do I know about statistics? No, really, what the hell do I know why the probability of dying between age 15 and 50 for females in 2026 was projected to be highest in Nigeria, and lowest in Monaco?

Sure, I can guess. Monaco has streets paved with gold, and lots of old folk that might be coming there for better tax benefits. The residents would naturally have better outcomes across the board.

Will the average denizen of Monaco in that age bracket die of heart failure or cancer, the leading causes of death? Is there more to it? How many of them suffer a stroke after catching their considerably younger spouse in bed with someone else? Or meet their end feeling bitter and alone in some world-class care facility?

What about the 240+ million people living in Nigeria? What are their daily woes and toils that make so many of them die at that age? Who are they, and what are they doing the day they leave this world? What do I know about them? Do their backs break in illegal lithium mines or are they victims of disease or violence?

Does that even matter for a data aggregator that is Measured World?

Forgive me for my generalisations, these images come to my mind when I think about both Monaco and Nigeria, and they have more to do with our media than reality. But it proves my point, I have not tasted the bread they ate or drank the same water.

Does that make me unsuited to write about them? I don't think so. At least, I want to believe it makes no difference. But it forces me to come clean, even if there has been no outright lie. I'm not an expert.

Still, the data comes from a source of authority, and for all intents and purposes is valid and important. But when it's all stripped down to data it just turns into another generic website that you could find anywhere or replicate with little issue. So how to make it distinct and memorable? Especially now when AI use is so rampant, and people turn to websites less and less. Am I too late to the game? Will the internet website become the next print magazine?

Am I talking into a void?

The other issue that's partially responsible for this silence are the bots. Turning on ads, and the fact Mediavine, essentially a web advertiser with relatively strict conditions, would accept me was great news. It was something I hoped for before the site was online. The change in cookie acceptance policy that came with the transition allowed me to see the complete traffic of the site.

Unfortunately, there are so many bots, and it's so hard and demoralising to fight them all the time. I cut off one point of entry, and in a few days they find a new way to intrude. You'd think I was privy to some secret stuff by how persistent they are.

Only the fact that there are real people here keeps me going. Maybe I'll have to rethink the Glimpse blog posts, and turn away from the dry reporting of strictly only the facts. There's no journalism without that human factor, and even if this might sound gimmicky, it's true.

There's just no point in doing this without people and the perspectives and life they bring. I don't think any kind of large language model could replace that.