Monday 21 February 2011

On the Myth of the Popular Blog Post

If I was one of those bloggers with google ads, and links to sites that pay me if you buy from them, or just pay per 15 million click-throughs, then the nature of my blog would be very different. I'd update it every day, without fail, for instance, and I'd be constantly writing stuff of spurious value, but with eye-catching snappy titles -like "Ten New Ways to Get a Perfect Figure Without Dieting" or "How Beeswax Poultices Cured My Depression Within One Week!", or "How to make Serious Money out of collecting Junk!" (subtitled "A Year Ago I Was Just Like You, Now I Live in a Thirty-Room Mansion, and Have a Ferrari as my Lawnmower!"
In short, if I was obsessed by getting lots of visitors, I'd write stuff like that. Instead, I view large numbers of visitors with some suspicion. What the hell are they doing here?

Seriously, folks, if you really want to know how to cure your cat's hacking cough, or make a million in three months by doing something that's so simple you'll kick yourself when I tell you how, then you've come to the wrong place.

My wealth-making abilities are such that I'll probably need to keep working for at least a year AFTER I'm dead.

However, this post started with me looking at my site-monitor/meter. I ditched Site-Meter, because it missed so many visitors. I use Active-Meter, to find out simple stuff about my visitors, like where in the world they are (approximately, fear not.... I can't usually locate you any closer than your ISP's nominal address, which, in the U.S. may not even be in the same state as you, if I look at my own visits, I appear to vary my location by a couple of hundred miles, depending on where my ISP routes me), I'm also interested in where they found a link to me, which are regular visitors etc. It's just curiousity. I've got someone in Ulan Bator, who drops in on a weekly basis, there's a police department in Australia....
Well, they popped up after I made reference to a horrifying attack on garden gnomes in Western Australia. The press dubbed it "The Gnomesville Massacre". I'm not sure if the aussie cops think I might be a suspect, or whether they're just happy that their cause is publicised half a world away.

For the last few weeks, approximately two hundred and fifty people, per day, seem to have been googling "Why Women Shouldn't Skydive Nude". Or Binging it. They all end up at a post I made ages ago- http://gritinthegears.blogspot.com/2009/04/skydiving-in-high-heels.html. 
This contained an eye-popping pic of two men and two women, in freefall, naked. And the eye-popping bit is how boobies change their shape in a 120mph updraught. In the picture, they turn into inverted hemispherical cup-shapes.  Now I'm a man, and thus have no personal experience of the effects of high velocity air on boobies.
Judging by the expressions on the jumpers' faces, it's no big deal. They're smiling. Or is that another 12o mph updraft artifact. (See what I did there? Bilingual, me!)
Oh? did you just click the link and go take a look?
Sorry.
I just got a bit irked by all those uncouth visitors trailing by, leaving muddy footprints but, despite their numbers, never a comment, so I pulled the pic. If titillation is what they seek, the interweb's got plenty of titills. Let them lurk elsewhere.
The numbers even outdid my "Tractor Porn" post's highest ever total... For weeks. every day... Um. 280 so far, looking for that pic, today. No backlash as yet.
Eventually Google and Bing will figure out it's gone. then I might put it back up.