Friday, May 14, 2010

Welcome, visitor. You're in good company.

I was reminded today of a TV show that I read about a couple years ago. There was a going to be a new show called Boldly Going Nowhere that was a parody of a Star Trek type show. And when I saw the story I wrote a blog post called, Boldly Going to Court where I threatened to sue Fox Television for stealing my idea for a Star Trek parody. As if no one else had ever gone there before.

Now, what was really funny about that post was that for the next few days, my blog stats showed several visits from an IP address owned by Fox.

And that was hilarious. I couldn't believe that someone in some office at Fox Television was reading my blog because I mentioned them. And threatened a lawsuit. It just freaked me out. And then the show kind of disappeared from the radar. Did my blog scare someone? I doubt it, but that would be awesome if my fake threat caused some executive to push back production of a TV show.

Like most bloggers, I use software to collect stats on how many visitors this blog receives. And like most bloggers, I expected the numbers to be much higher than they really are. I mean, seriously, before you started, didn't you think that 50 or 60 people would visit your blog every day? Sure, you secretly hoped for thousands of visitors, but you're only publishing about 300 words, three times a week, so what did you expect? If you wanted real traffic, you'd just repost news snippets and links to other sites without producing any original content.

And every day or so, I check my stats to see how few of you actually give a shit about what I have to say. And boy, it's depressing. Or at least it was until a couple of years ago when I realized that the internet is a bitch.

There is no guarantee that anything you ever do will be appreciated by anyone. So you've got to just please yourself. Oh, God, did I just quote that Rick Nelson song, "Garden Party"? Hey, it's a good song.

Anyway, one of the main reasons I check stats it so see if any interesting visitors show up. I don't mean that you're not interesting because you are, but I mean interesting like, strange. And I don't mean you're not strange...

So I look for anomalies. Like I've received visits from whitehouse.gov, loc.gov and supremecourt.gov. The Supreme Court visited my blog???? Was that about that thing with Justice Alito? Again?

And today, a visit from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And it's not from a google search, but someone went directly to my blog. Wtf? I don't remember posting anything about the weather.

I know some of these places have their own people, like interns, who scour the net looking for blog mentions, so I can see how that might attract a few of these visits, but I don't go around salting my posts with mentions of The United States Supreme Court just so I get a hit.

But maybe I should. Supreme Court. White House. Oprah.

I've never had a visit from number10.gov.uk, but my guess is they're too busy to notice me right now. But maybe next month.