King  Gary 

Thanks to Google Blog Search, when people search for ‘american idol sanjaya‘, my blog post on Sanjaya being booted from the show is in the top 2 search results. (It was #1 for about an hour, until someone else dethroned me.) I find it pretty insane that my blog can now attribute the largest surge of traffic to none other than American Idol - thanks FOX for creating the show! Don’t you know that I’m secretly targeting the American-Idol-geeks demographic for my blog?

Some interesting things that I noticed off the bat, were that my site immediately hit 60 concurrent visitors within 5 minutes of making the post, and that comments came in to the post even before I finished editing it (I made the post, published it, then went back to edit it since it’s a time-sensitive post.) I also sent the post to Digg (typically, I would wait until someone else submitted one of my posts before Digging it, but this was a time-sensitive post, so I just did it myself) and so far, I’m at 52 diggs and its the item with the highest number of Diggs regarding this issue. What I don’t quite get is why Google’s main search engine doesn’t use any of the pages indexed by Google’s Blog Search - a search for ’sanjaya’ on my site brings up nothing on Google, but it works on the Blog Search.

It’s definitely an interesting experience - it changed my perspective on my own blogging. I’m not saying that I’ll be making American Idol posts from now on (although, I know that some of you would LOVE to see me try), but rather, that I’m going to make an effort to blog more. I’d hate to be best known as ‘a blog that reported Sanjaya being booted from American Idol’, so I’m going to start pushing out posts on OTHER topics that are Digg- and Techmeme-worthy in the future. I’m pretty sure that working at b5media, a blogging network, has helped, too.

I think I’ve written posts with fairly good content in the past (I would like to note that I believe I’ve improved over the last few months), but the problem, as many readers probably know, is that I don’t blog enough! This event has changed my thoughts on blogging, and starting now, I’ll try and push out more useful posts like never before (it shouldn’t be too hard, considering that I used to only make a few posts every month!)

If you’ve got an idea on what topics you’d like to see posted here, feel free to let me know in the comments. I’ve got a few posts in the pipes, but I’m also really interested in hearing what your thoughts are.

Update:

In one day, the number of subscribers to my blog jumped from 98 to 119 subscribers, a 21% increase, which is the biggest jump that my blog has ever had. (Even though it’s not impressive when compared to large blogs, but still - it’s something I’m happy to see!)

Here’s the graph for the number of subscribers that my blog has had since its inception:

Popularity: 24% [?]