More on who died in a blogging accident
Tue 22 Jan 2008It has been interesting to watch the fluctuations in the number of pages returned by the Google search, (died in a blogging accident), referred to in my previous post. As many commenters have noted, the number goes up and the number goes down.
It seems there are three forces at work here:
- Clowns like me, MrCopilot and now Archie, create blog posts containing the phrase “died in a blogging accident”, the number goes up.
- Spambots recognise the activity and start creating even more spam blog posts containing the phrase, the number goes up some more. Here is an example of such a spam blog post. (WARNING: It’s safe to go there but DO NOT CLICK on the links in the spam blog post. They don’t take you to where you might expect.)
- Google cleverly recognises these spam blog posts and eliminates them from its search results, the number goes down again.
It’s also interesting to note the difference in results returned by executing the same search at google.com and the again at google.com.au.
What’s really happening here is geeks are just 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.
I know many of my friends have identified themselves as xkcd fans. I suspect others are probably also fans, they just haven’t blogged about it extensively.
And speaking of friends, our local cinema chain has re-introduced allocated seating. It’s caused all sorts of problems and I bet they didn’t once think about this…
PS. When you go to xkcd, don’t forget to hover your mouse over the cartoon and read the pop-up alt text. If you don’t, you’ll miss half the joke.
