The Columnist Manifesto

If you have a blog, and a hit counter, a fun thing to do is to check the "referral pages" from time to time. The hit counter makes a record of the web page that was viewed by someone immediately before he or she surfed to your blog.

This can be particularly fun when the "referral page" is a Google search. Looking at my recent referral pages I learned some interesting things.

If you were to do a search for, say, "Larry David buddy icons," you would get 66,000 results. CM comes up fourth, thanks to my post "Life Imitates Larry David." (You don't know what a "buddy icon" is? Check here.)

I also see that someone came to my blog by a Google search string for the phrase "asterisks put on stats in baseball," which pulls up my post "Asterisks" first among 5,360 search results. The Washington Post comes in at number 3.

The Google search "has not won a world series since 1908" pulls up my post called "Curses" as the very first site among 180,000 search results!

Finally "big butt TV" pulls up my post by that name as the fourth of 1.51 MILLION search results. However, mine seems to be the only one that's not porn.

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UPDATE: Okay, last one, I promise. A search for "wide ties" comes up with this CM post as the sixth search result out of... [drumroll] ... 7.36 MILLION!

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