Stumble In Moderation

After an abnormally prolific blogging week last week, as Hubbers so cleverly pointed out, I have nothing to say this week. So I decided to play with old content. I knew that my Moderation Proof post back in August still had some capacity to interest the masses, despite the lackluster response it got from my regular readers. So I submitted it to Digg. Unbelievably, "digging" the article generated exactly zero page hits. No one clicked on that article at Digg. Part of the problem is that it didn't fit into their category structure, and I chose the "Health" category, because there wasn't a "Mathematics" or "Linguistics" category.

I also did a quick search for web forums about logic and ended up submitting it to the Physics Forums where it got a bunch of clever remarks, but little interest.

Finally I submitted it to StumbleUpon. For those of you that don't know, StumbleUpon is a toolbar that sits in your browser, and when you see a web page that you like, you click the "I like it!" button. Then, when you're bored and looking for something interesting on the internet, you click the "Stumble!" button, and it takes you to a random site that someone else has marked as "I like it!". There's a tagging system to ensure that you get sent to sites about topics that interest you and the sites are weighted, so you're more likely to be sent to a site that lots of people have "liked".

As of right now, approximately 24 hours after I submitted that page to SU, 20 people have also marked it positively, and a few have left comments. My blog normally gets between 130 and 250 unique hits every day. In the last 24 hours it got almost 2000!

My stats from Google Analytics from the past week.

Pretty crazy, huh? I even "inspired" some dude to write a blog entry about the stupid things people say and how we need a new set of social linguistic rules.

Popularity, like money, is easy to generate more of once you have a lot of it already. Spread the meme.