by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/11/01 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/11/01/5770097.aspx
A post that is so meta that it no longer knows on what level it really sits. But everyone loves a good Dr. Seuss reference and the Michael Frith book may not be as well known? :-)
Okay, we have now reached the end of October and the bold experiment I undertook in this blog -- an experiment that involved writing 100 posts in one month (and it happened in October 2007).
The reason for this experiment was the claim that someone made to me that the so-called popularity of this blog was based on having so many posts for subscribers to read.
Frankly, when I looked at my referrer logs, it became clear to me that the majority of traffic is actually hits from search engines in general (and Google in particular, a point I raised in It looks like you are using Google anyway...).
Thus if one ignores individual people who like (or love, or enjoy, or hate but can't stop) reading here (and while I obviously can't ignore them without becoming the suckiest host ever, most of you people can and probably should), the real bulk of the traffic is coming from people searching for information.
If I were on the Live Search team I might be concerned about the fact that despite the prominent placement of SIAO in MSDN's own search results (ref: Search and ye shall find, SIAO style!) the fact remains that more people are getting here via Google than via Live Search, though I would probably understand that things are essentially this way. The mindshare simply isn't there, even if the results might be?
And I won't know for a few days if I was able to prove that increasing my content by between 1/3 and 1/2 did not substantially change the statistics, the numbers from the somewhat flawed view that Community Server provides does seem to bear out what I am saying, at least at first glance.
Of course the experiment had another interesting side effect, entirely predictable from the trend discussed in Sometimes a request is made of me and the question is asked in such a way that I just don't know exactly how to respond and that is those aforementioned devoted readers will find the sheer volume to be a bit much, and as a consequence I end up seeing people being largely converted from Category B ("I love your blog!") to Category C ("I like your blog, but I also have a life").
(More on the categories in this post!)
Anyway, now that I have done the 100 posts in a month, I think I will go back to two a day. I am not really caught up back to where I wanted to be with possible topics and such (which was the secondary reason for the increase in daily post count) but I figure if Raymond Chen can be working as far ahead as he is in actual written topics then I can probably stand to let the list of things I haven't done yet keep increasing.
Although the list is not at all tied to job security (the list is not one that is used as a job metric for my work and I seldom write for the blog during working hours), it is at least a form of content security because any time I can't think of something to write about I have a list of about 347 things that I thought potentially interesting enough to save to the list....
In theory I could have even gone to four or even five posts a day without impacting the job, but only by either increasing the trite post percentage or sacrificing the whole life thing. I think I'll have enough data to prove my point without going cimpletely blog-crazy for a month....
Now as the issues described in It looks like you are using Google anyway... come back around in this post, one thing has become clear -- it really doesn't matter which search engine I use on the site itself since the vast majority of people who are searching do so from outside the blog anyway.
So the answer to the question of which search engine to host -- what's the (to borrow from Martin Cruz Smith momentarily -- Gorky Park?) sharp and greasy, smooth and nasty, barbed and two-pronged mother freaking point to the question, since it's not how people are going to find content here anyway?
If you are one of those people who would have rather read every post until I went all Scoble on you this last month, never fear as I will be downshifting back to my "usually two a day during the week, anywhere from zero to many on the weekend" schedule you were enjoying previously. I will probably still not be able to do anything about the issue with gating interesting posts so if you are that person or someone like her then you may have to just grin and bear it (or find a blog written by somebody who finds fewer things interesting than I!).
This post brought to you by 𐅪 (U+1016a, a.k.a. GREEK ACROPHONIC THESPIAN ONE HUNDRED)
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