"Gene Scott" - "Reggie Roby" - "Iran Earthquake" - "U.S. Geological Survey" posted by Ben

What do these hot topics have in common? Absolutely nothing. If you're reading this text on a search engine blurb, you're probably curious about how your Reggie Roby obsession fits in with Iran. I'll make this crystal clear. It doesn't. And I have no clue who Reggie Roby is, which probably puts me way outside the internet mainstream. If you're still reading, you probably are looking at the actual post, rather than a search engine summary, so I can dispense with the nonsense and get down to an actual point.

OK, so the site stat counter went off the wall today. I make one little post about the Frank Luntz playbook in a header and get deluged with 200 more visitors than usual in the space of four hours. (Or as usual as anything can be for something that's existed just slightly longer than a week.)

Thanks to a link from the Technorati search engine (which I've never heard of) there goes my gentle daily increased readership curve. (And my ability to track regulars. You know who you are and so do I. Mostly.)

And it's only 7:30 on the West Coast right now. By midnight maybe the blog will reach critical mass and turn into a pumpkin.

Perhaps I can learn a lesson from this: if I want to increase readership, I should forget the whole striving-for-quality thing. Making post headers with hot key words is far more important! (How easily we fall into a pattern of selling out. Which explains the title of my post. Thanks to the Yahoo Buzz Index for that one!)

At least one constant remains. Not one of those visitors, including the 25% who stuck around for up to twenty minutes, felt the need to comment on anything that I wrote. I guess I really ought to either a) be more provocative or b) post a picture of a hot chick and pretend that I'm her.

Update: Now I've had over 500 visitors in less than twenty-four hours. The irony is that I doubt I have whatever they're looking for! With that in mind, I have updated my Republican Playbook post to direct them toward some primary sources.