Take Two

No, I am not speaking of some super-bug that infects the body (or computer) but the process by which the power of the internet is unleashed.  I am a fan of all things Web 2.0 and have mildly active (read:not really) accounts for Facebook and MySpace.  My most prominent online presence is through Twitter, LinkedIn and this blog.  I try to post something every day because it’s an outlet for my creative muse, such that it is, and I have a number of loyal readers.

In the past two weeks, that number has increased exponentially.  Allow me to elaborate.  On March 10, less than a month ago, I put up a little self-congratulatory post regarding my 15,000th blog hit.  My blog readership had been between 60-100 readers depending on the day of the week (Monday was highest, Saturday lowest) and how often I was blogging.  This is around the level of my old blog before I came over to WordPress. 

On March 19 I put up this post with a little girl singing the Lord’s Prayer.  It was a YouTube link sent to me by a friend of mine in Toledo.  I thought she was cute but didn’t think she would change the face of my blog forever.  Sister Elms linked to me a day or two after I put that post up and I saw a spike in my traffic; up to a couple hundred views per day for the next few days.  Her readership is significantly larger than mine so I attributed the bump to that.  That’s when it went viral.  Folks have copied and pasted the link to that particular post and emailed it around the world, apparently several times.  Here are my page views for the last week:

As I type this, I have had 89,822 total hits to this blog, about 1,000 more than when I started this post.  The thing that is more interesting to me is that according to today’s stats, about 1,000 readers did not come to the site through the March 19 post link.  Perhaps we’re retaining a few readers.  Who knows.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I have always heard about the viral nature of the internet.  I’m getting to watch it first hand now.  And it’s a kick.