Last month while in Beijing I had the good fortune to have a nice plate of Wikipedia. Of course, I blogged about it. There was some initial attention but, honestly, I'd fallen off (still haven't fully climbed back on) the blogging wagon and my pageviews showed it.
But I figured that one day, someone would notice the Wikipedia post and it would go crazy. It was just too good and the pictures Pockey took were excellent.
So today, a cascade of sites picked up the Wikipedia post and my pageviews, which were seriously depressed, did this:
Now I feel like Thomas Dolby Robertson - I have this huge back catalog of really great work and all people are going to remember are my novelty posts.
Of course, this is largely my own fault. When I was posting regularly my daily traffic would hover at better levels.
What's also interesting about this though is that the instigating site was, apparently, a food site, then spread to kottke, geek press, and Waxy (Nov 28th). And from there to a host of other sites, like this much appreciated summarization by Dan Bruno.
So this further confirms a few things I've long expected:
(1) Geeks are actually migrating away from Jolt and Chips to fully embracing food culture. In many instances, my food posts have raised as many comments as my better tech posts
(2) Write it and they will come. In England they are warning kids that Blogging is Forever. Two edged sword obviously. But, if you leave nice nuggets up, people come back to them. I've been watching this fairly closely as I've been writing less. When I was getting around 200 or 300 pageviews a day, much of that was coming to new content. When there was no new content, my pageviews fell to half that.
(3) Network effects extend naturally outside of predictable network paths. They are not linear. LinkedIn and other social networking sites currently do not recognize this. Facebook allows you to be a member of a variety of Networks, but only one of them can be geographic. What is up with that? I belong to three geographic networks: Seattle, The Bay Area, and Beijing. Who is Facebook to cordon me off to merely one?
Two final interesting things about (2) above:
(A) New subscribers kept coming even when I wasn't posting (I suspect because going directly to the site was no longer rewarding)
(B) Certain articles started gaining in stature as I was dealing more and more with natural search traffic. The clear winner in those? Aggregation pages.
I'll blog more about my natural search observations later. But, now that I've firmly profited from my own "Blinded Me with Science", I need to quickly go write up my "Hyperactive!"
Waxy IM'd me, thinking I was you, with some jokes about your post -- I didn't get what he was talking about until I saw his link. . . and now this post.
Posted by: Jay Fienberg | 29 November 2007 at 16:40