My blog site is not immensely popular, but it has it’s moments. I average about 15K-20K hits a month. There are spikes of course. Every once in a while, somebody with middle eastern connections will trip across the editorial cartoon I did of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This will cause a flurry of comments, which I ignore. (I shut down the comment thread for this blog post a year ago; out of sheer boredom.) Of course the comments and the hits bring relevance to the post in Google’s eyes, which position it higher in the search engine. This means more eyes see it, which feeds its relevance. Again, those who see it, almost without exception, send links of it to their militant friends, which Google watches. Some of these people will post the article, or the caricature link inside a web forum, which will also cause a flurry of inbound links and then subsequent outbound moves to other relevant sites. All of which reflects positively on the page which they just left. (Mine.)

I sometimes wonder if those who are so militantly apposed to the cartoon (going on three years old) realize that they make it popular by visiting it and commenting on it? If you want to kill something on the web, ignore it. It will get buried under a mountain of apathy and nobody will see it. The more you rubberneck a particular post, the more other people will slow down to look at what you are looking at. It is a simple fact. Congrats to Google for quantifying this quirk of human nature into the most powerful search algorithm in the world.

However, this past month Mahmoud took a back seat to a new key-word rising star on my blog. This magic phrase is “bubble butt.” I mean really? How disappointing this hit must be for the ardent connoisseur of bubble butt when he(?) arrives at my post to see the G-rated rant about my anatomical drawing issues. It makes me chuckle a bit to be honest.

People all over the world are searching for criticlal relevant information, and the nexus is Mahmoud Bubble Butt. There’s a cartoon in there someplace. But the mental image is far to powerful to reproduce. Sometimes it is better not to draw what you see in your minds eye. Sometimes it is better to just let go.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS