Saturday, July 30, 2011

Which posts get hits?

Blogger tracks how many hits each post gets, and it's weird to see which ones win the competition. Some people would phrase this as "which ones are the most popular." But of course, hits are just a reflection of the tags at the end of the post. Did people search for those words or not? That's what makes a "hit". Popularity ain't got nothing to do with it.

Looking at the results, it's easy to see that when I write about popular or newsworthy things, I get hits. Just see # 1 below. In any case, here are my top ten posts, judged by # of hits (they're linked so you can click on them to read the posts):
  1. So many people died in yesterday's tornadoes
  2. Don't forget: the world ends today
  3. Old Italian women in black veils
  4. Confirmed: Giants' Brian Wilson is straight
  5. Sundance documentary: Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare
  6. What's with the baseball umpires?
  7. A little help from some fab guys
  8. Truly scary movies
  9. Michio Kaku on Fukushima
  10. NOVA Japan earthquake show
# 7 is just a video of the Beatles singing "Help". And it's no surprise that # 4 (Brian Wilson's sexuality) got a lot of hits. People wanna know. # 3 surprises me. You wouldn't think it would generate hits. I'm glad to see #8 up there because I liked that post. At least someone, somewhere read it. And hey, someone read a baseball post (#6)!

On the other hand, I got a zillion hits and no comments except for Annie's? What's wrong with this picture? C'mon, folks: comment! Tell me what you think. All sane bloggers welcome this. And as for your end of the deal, commenting is half the fun of visiting blogs -- and it's not scary, really.

One caveat regarding the lack of comments: the Brian Wilson post did generate comments. Not a lot, but comments. One was snarky but hey, that's fine. Express your opinions, people. It's what blogs are all about. Otherwise, we'd just write our posts on a typewriter and then drop the pages on the floor. Live a little -- comment.