The hazards of having a popular blog

My blog doesn't get a lot of traffic. Most of the people who come here are personal friends, fellow bloggers*, or visitors from Sammie's sdfsdf.wox.org, Camilla's Wallflower.nu, Bill's Industrial Blog, and sometimes Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy. Sammie and Bill have links to me, and Bill, Camilla and Adam allow you to include a link with each comment. As a frequent commenter at each site, that's a little bit of exposure, and I do get a few (very much appreciated) visitors from each of them.

I also sometimes get searchers, people who find my site through Google or Yahoo or other search engines. I hope some of these folks like what they see and decide to come back. The person who searched for "satanic goat picture" might have found what they were looking for; the person who searched for "pitchers of monkey bars" probably didn't.

Then there are the random walkers who came here through Blogger's "Next Blog" button. This is a pretty neat tool for adding a bit of randomness to your online experience.

Blogger.com has a section called "Blogs Of Note", a spotlight for "some blogs we've noticed recently." Getting picked for this spotlight is a sure way of driving your readership through the roof. It happened to Cooking For Engineers, although the cause-and-effect relationship here isn't clear. The date that Blogger.com spotlighted this blog is Friday, September 10, 2004, but the author had reported a dramatic increase in traffic beginning the previous Wednesday - from 20-40 hits per day to 110,000 hits on September 11. Yesterday, September 24, he received a mere 1600 hits, according to his Sitemeter.

A sadder case occurred a week later. On Friday, September 17, the blog "I Found Some Of Your Life" was spotlighted. The premise for this blog was unique: the author claimed to have found a lost camera memory card in a New York taxicab. The card contained 277 photos taken from late July 2003 through late July 2004. The blogger decided to create a blog and publish the photos - one a day - ostensibly as a way of finding the rightful owner. But in the meantime, he decided to have some fun: he created a fictitious story to go with the pictures. Individuals were assigned names, relationships, and backstories. Inexplicable situations were explained away. It was clever, original, and possibly illegal.

(Once upon a time I lost some photos. I had taken them to Kmart for developing, but when they came back, somebody else's photos were in my envelope. A man and woman in their early 20's, a dog, and an expensive-looking pickup truck. A lot of photos of the truck.

This was years ago. My photos, as far as we could tell, were irretrievably lost, as were this other person's. I wished there was some way of standing up on a box somewhere and shouting "I found your pictures! Did you find mine?")

Blogger.com spotlighted IFSOYL on Friday, September 17. I first visited on Sunday, September 19. By then loads of other new readers had chimed in with praise, condemnation, suggestions, accusations that it was all a hoax, and questions of the legality of the entire enterprise. By Tuesday, September 21, the photos and story were gone. As of today, the whole site is gone, and the name of the blog has a strikethrough on Blogger.com's homepage.

What happened? Did the memory card's owner's frat brothers threaten legal or physical action? Did the site's host pull the plug, due to bandwidth limitations or legal concerns? Did the crush of popularity get too much for the blogger? I don't know.

Someday I would like to see more site traffic. But for now I am happy for the readers I have. These two case histories illustrate the hazards of having a popular blog.

UPDATE: This post just goes to show what a novice I am with this whole Internet thingie. Apparently, the biggest factor in the crush of visitors to IFSOYL was an article written about the site on Slashdot ("News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.") I wonder if something similar happened with Cooking For Engineers?

*These fellow bloggers include, but are not limited to, Michael (Innisfree Online), Fran (Fran's Funky Blog 'O' Love), Jen (Virtual Jen, currently on hiatus), Siobhan (Trying To Find My Own), and Rimalicious (Rimorama). Sorry if I missed anybody - please let me know!