MUDGE’s Musings
This nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© averages roughly 50 hits a day. As reading L-HC indicates that faithful reader indubitably has exquisitely refined taste, I’m not unhappy with that number, exactly. It’s about 50 more people than ever read whatever I might have written before taking up blogging.
Today, 96 hits.
Wow, did my latest post, on web conferencing, hit a nerve?
Not exactly.
50 people clicked on a link from last August, a story about Barack Obama. And I have WordPress.com to thank.
It seems recently they added a delightful feature when one publishes a post: Possibly related posts: (automatically generated) wherein the system pulls out three or four stories that share a tag or category with the article just posted. It’s a handy resource, one small example of the feature-rich service that WordPress.com provides (in my case, nearly cost-free) to nearly 3.5million blogs.
Turns out that FoxNews.com, of all sites, is the source of today’s doubled traffic.
They happen to be hosted on WordPress.com. Now, that’s an interesting fact in itself. One would think that a large global organization such as Rupert Murdoch’s would have the resources to host its own blog. But I suppose they know a better mousetrap when they see one (I certainly do!), and thus let WordPress.com do the heavy lifting.
Today, FoxNews.com ran a story about an incumbent Republican candidate for senator in Oregon who is running an advertisement “touting his ties to the Senate’s most liberal member,” Barack Obama. And guess whose post from last August, “Barack Obama’s Republican edge” did WordPress.com include in its automatically generated “possibly related posts?”
Now, one has to wonder about those 50 people. I imagine they clicked away in mere microseconds when they realized what sort of blog they innocently encountered. Certainly not quite the political approach they’re accustomed to if they’re Fox News devotees.
I must say, that WordPress.com sent me to the Fox News site for the first time; I never, ever watch their cable news station. Unlikely that I’ll be back any time soon, mirroring I’m certain the instincts of those 50 lost souls who found themselves in such foreign territory.
So, the synergy of the Internet strikes one yet again. In the same way a Republican in a liberal state reaches out to independently minded voters by invoking this year’s favorite Democratic Senator, folks reading a blog run by one of the most cynically illiberal news organizations on the planet are directed here, a site most un-illiberal, if I may coin such a doubly-negative, aspirational characterization. Go figure.
50 Fox News readers. Glad I had my clean underwear on.
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
Left-handed Complement 