Interesting Developments

In an earlier post I revealed that my blogging activities had a sinister purpose.

Unlike many bloggers, I don't feel the need to bare dark personal secrets in this space. Anyway, I don't have too many juicy bits of gossip that anybody (other than my mother) would care to listen to. Rather, I simply want to talk about whatever interests me (gasp!). Well that, and to learn through practical experience what moves web traffic and how crowds respond.

So I wrote some content that wouldn't make Robert X. Cringely fear for his job but similarly wasn't shabby for a 30 minute morning hobby. At times I'd submit my work to news sites like digg and newsvine and reddit. Not much (nothing, actually) made it to the top of any of those lists. And in the three months I've been doing this I haven't developed a following of rabidly supportive followers, ready to raise the banner in whatever direction I tell them for my cause de jeur.

I wouldn't consider this a failure of the experiment, merely an indication that I haven't figured out the formula to this whole thing - and since this has been a very casual experiment, who knows if I will ever get the formula thing down. I understand there is time (and effort!) involved in being popular.

All that to say this - I did a Google search today on "whatever's interesting". This site is number one. What!? I don't know how many people search on that exact phrase - it seems rather unlikely that a huge amount of people would - but that's just cool. Check it out.

What's weird to me is that N and I now have something like 40 posts going. A search for this site (the syntax for this is "site:whateversinteresting.blogspot") on Google only shows seven entries. And it's not just the first seven that they grabbed, but rather a random smattering.
Unsure exactly what that means.

Anyway, my social experimentation has entered a new season of its life. I'm happy that at least I'm in Google now. If somebody's looking for a story about surly chain-smoking police monkeys, we're going to be getting hits galore.