Fun trivia moment to start us off.
So I posted the previous post, headlined "Sex!" (in response to the lively conversation about Tim A's post of two weeks ago on the subject) on Tuesday afternoon. The blog has been largely dark for the past week (Dan's great post on Friday being the exception) and so we'll need to regain some momentum. So, as of late afternoon Tuesday, the post had generated exactly zero comments.
Out of mild curiosity, I checked in to see how many hits the post had gotten, figuring our number would be at about a third of the readership from two weeks back, given the lack of posts. And, indeed, many days did trend that direction.
EXCEPT for Tuesday itself. It was the biggest day in the history of the blog. By a lot.
How could this be? The post that had driven this massive traffic hadn't generated a single comment at that point. Surely there must be a glitch.
So I checked the hit count through another method, as a control. Yup, the number was right. Our biggest day ever, lack of comments or no.
And then it hit me. The post was called "Sex!"
I assume this is a parable of how search engines work. And a picture of the main purpose of the internet? (I read a stat some years back that 40% of internet traffic, worldwide, was to porn sites.)