This is a very old website, with very old links, converted from Google Classic to the new Google Sites. Little of it will be updated.
Post date: Jul 17, 2009 5:37:05 PM
This week I've been momentarily buoyed by a spike in viewership in my regular blogs. In recognition of the accidental hits from global surfers, I've installed a stat counter on Sweven Volant that tracks users and posts their national flags in the sidebar. Just a fun little thing.
But Small Laws has seen some dynamicity lately. Back in the beginning, a friend of mine boosted me on MNSpeak, and I got a brief flux of attention from that group--negative attention, but attention nonetheless. Their hits smell the same to me. Then, for no reason I could discern, my "complaining about traffic" blog started receiving a lot of traffic directed from Netvibes, a portal service like Google Reader but less popular. Never heard of them before, and I had to deduce they have some kind of blog-search function that works with geography, and Small Laws is full of geographical pointers and allusions.
However, it wasn't until I saw traffic coming from Outside.in that I decided to actively cultivate that relationship. I read their instructions on "geotagging" and have been modifying past entries to conform to that context. In that blog's sidebar I installed their StoryMap, which looks like a Google map but with little indicators marking where each blog post takes place! That's a cool idea to me, and even if no one else uses it I'm totally playing ball. Unique visits have gone from zero to 100+ in the last 72 hours, so I won't argue with those results. I'm posting more and will work harder to get photographs online.