Rambling Rhodes

Epiphany

I tallied just over 27,000 visitors to this blog last month; I was just shy of 2,000 yesterday; and it looks like I'm poised to easily surpass that today. These numbers are rather amazing to me.

And it occurred to me that this blog has pretty much obliterated any sense of personal online anonymity. Between this blog and the IBM magazine articles I've written over the years, my name is a simplistic Google search away.

When I started this thing as an outlet to strengthen my writing, I never really expected it to be viewed by 27,000 people a month. Hell, for the first year or so I was, maybe, tallying 20 views a day, with most of those being me. So, as I watched the insanity that was my Site-Meter for July, I felt more than just a little bit e-Naked. The number of people looking for my infamous ass picture truly was rather amazing. I mean. . . WHY?

Sure, I've done little experiments in hit-whoring over the years, but they've never really amounted to much. July, however, drove some fairly sobering thoughts into my head.

Firstly, any job I ever actually manage to get a sit-down interview for, I can be fairly certain that the person conducting the interview will have read at least some portion of my blog in preparation. And that's assuming they'd ever want a sit-down interview in the first place, considering the crassness and potty humor on display here.

Secondly, I'm not sure there's any going back at this point. Oh, I suppose I could, someday, if the traffic gets too scary, take all of this down, pour gas on it, and strike a match (a la Plain Layne/Odin Soli), but Google, specifically, and the Internet in general tends to remember ALL. I can never really expect to say "nope, didn't do it; there's nothing to see here; ignore all that excremental humor."

Thirdly, I can't fool myself: there's a very bigly part of me that really wants to see how wild and crazy this blog traffic can get. Sure, it could all just be an anomalous month or so of increased traffic, but it could also continue growing and growing as the Internet thirst for my ass picture reaches infinite proportions.

Finally, I've said it before, but it really is true: the Inter-Web is weird. I mean, why this blog? It's nonsensical, infantile, crass, un-focused and not at all visually compelling. Compared to a lot of blogs on my usual-read list, this blog sucks the mighty wang, and yet those blogs get 1/5 the traffic. It makes no sense.

All this thinkering could be pointless, of course, because as I noted, it could all just be a fluke month of unusually high traffic. But, having just tallied my 1,080th visitor at 1:30 p.m., there's part of me that thinks it may be here to stay.

Posted by Ryan at August 1, 2006 12:32 PM | TrackBack