Who died in a blogging accident?
Sat 12 Jan 2008Statistics derived from Google died in a blogging accident, that’s who. Publication of this xkcd cartoon is an extreme demonstration of the Observer Effect. To paraphrase: You cannot measure something without changing it in some way.
Cartoon by xkcd.
Bloggers everywhere linked to it and now even the spammers are getting on the bandwagon. Search Google now for “died in a blogging accident” and the count is in the thousands. Interestingly, I’ve noticed the number trim back slightly over the past few hours - possibly as Google identifies the spammers?
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Update: Sun 13 Jan
Google Trends charts for “died in a blogging accident” make interesting reading. The chart for January 11 shows a spike 1 hour after the XKCD cartoon was posted; this is expected. However, January 12 shows a spike at 6am PST; what caused this?
January 13th, 2008 at 1:06
I’d like to see a graph of count vs. time since publication of the article. XKCD rocks
-J
January 13th, 2008 at 1:41
G’day jmatt.
Yes, that would be interesting. I saw some earlier comments when the cartoon was about 12 hours old and the count was then about 2,000. When I wrote this post, the count was 7,200. Now, 7 hours later, the count is 46,900. (My timezone is UTC+10)
Cheers — Mike
January 13th, 2008 at 9:36
It went up exponentially over the first few hours. Slashdot picked up and now it is ridiculous.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:16
G’day MrCopilot,
I’ve updated my post with links to Google Trends charts. I wonder if the spike at 6am PST on Jan 12 was caused by Slashdot? (… or your post and comments everywhere?)
Cheers — Mike
January 13th, 2008 at 10:44
I like your thought about the Observer Effect, but that’s not strictly applicable in this case. This would be more accurately described as a “publishing effect” of sorts; the observation itself did not alter the phenomenon.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:58
Yep, you are quite right VL. In this case, the phenomenon has been caused by first observing and then publishing the results to agents (ie the public) who have the ability to amplify the observed value. It’s also a good demonstration of “positive feedback” in control systems terms.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:53
Mike,
I really was just trying to make a casual observation, but it seems that I am not the only reader of Google trends, if you search again and page through a few results you’ll see all kinds of spam bots and others trying to take a advantage of the traffic. Also not the only reader of XKCD, I was not the only blogger who titled a post with that name. After my initial post, I received an abnormally high # of Google search traffic hits for the title. I found this all the funnier. After 12Hrs the numbers of results had skyrocketed and I thought it newsworthy beyond my little corner of the net, it was posted to the Firehose at Slashdot this morning and they liked it enough to put it on the frontpage and you know how that goes. Since my post contains a link to Googles search, I caused even more traffic. As for my comments, I alway thank a blogger who links me.
That clear up the mystery?
All very good for Xkcd. He deserves the recognition, his comics are brilliant. I hope he sold a few thousand T-shirts. I’m putting in my order for this one on Friday.
January 14th, 2008 at 13:00
I have no idea what this means.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:40
Hi Steph, It’s just geeks having fun. Some little boys poke reptiles with a stick to see what sort of reaction they get; Randall Munroe, talented author of the xkcd cartoon, poked the blogosphere with an intriguing Google search phrase. Same thing.
January 18th, 2008 at 14:18
Hmmm - I’m a week late (as usual) and the count is now up to 297,000 pages. Mr Co-pilot is #3 on the Google list and you are #4 - well done. Now I’m off to make it 297001
January 18th, 2008 at 21:45
It is now 11:40 on the 17th of January 2008 and there is 296,000 findings for “died in a blogging accident”. I find it fascinating how much one web page out of the millions out there can change the internet so drastically. I’d love to know what the original findings for the search were before the comic came out.
January 21st, 2008 at 20:10
On the 21st January, it’s dropped to only 155,000 results.
January 21st, 2008 at 21:09
G’day Archie. Thanks, mate.
Hi Jakuriku, I suppose the only person who can answer that is Randall Munroe, but I’m guessing that it was pretty close to 2.
Welcome Rachel, Yes, the number goes up, the number goes down.
It seems there are three forces at work here:
1 Clowns like me, MrCopilot and now Archie, create blog posts containing the phrase “died in a blogging accident”, the number goes up.
2 Spambots recognise the activity and start creating even more spam blog posts containing the phrase, the number goes up some more.
3 Google cleverly recognises these spam blog posts and eliminates them from its search results, the number goes down again.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:09
I wonder how long it will be before Randall makes a comic about the comic snowballing in Google hits like that. Maybe once it eclipses “died in an automobile accident” hits?
At the time of this post, the search returns over 56,900 hits, so there’s not much farther to go….
February 19th, 2008 at 5:21
it’s recieved somewhat less coverage than blogging, but the statistics for dying in a knitting accident as a function of time also make interesting reading. (”interesting” if you are that way inclined.)
listing the hits returned for different ways to die, as found on 14th Jan, and again on 18th feb gives:
Skydiving 1020 1350
Elevator 659 295
Surfing 524 614
Skateboarding 510 563
Camping 192 182
Gardening 190 179
Ice skating 94 131
Knitting 1890 639
Blogging 18800 48600
all methods of death return reference to xkcd in the top three results. some people you just have to take your hat off to.
June 11th, 2008 at 13:24
I’m getting 1,310,000 results now…damn.