For 2 1/2 blissful years, I’ve been blogging via WordPress. I have nothing but fine, kind words to say about the WordPress blogging tool. It is easy to use, and my posts look how I want them to, and I have now figured out just about how to do everything, and the staff is supportive (writing those informative posts about how to improve the appearance and content of your blog) and last, and most important, they provide a vast amount of helpful statistics which can help in the analysis of what appeals to readers; i.e. which posts are the most popular.
My most popular post was about euphemisms, called 20 Examples of Great Euphemisms. Every day when I go to my stats, there that sucker is, in first place. Every damn day! I’m glad the world is interested in euphemisms but I doubt this is an indication of how well my blog is doing. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s doing all that well so when I see there have been 50 views and 30 of them are for that post, I’m not thrilled by the news.
WordPress supplies the search terms used which caused the reader to end up clicking on the link to the blog post, and the term “euphemism” as of today had 456 searches. There were other combinations of search words used, I counted 84 of them which contained the word “euphemism”. What’s with this, I ask myself. First of all, how are so many people getting to this post? When I Googled “euphemism” I went through 50 pages without seeing my post come up. When I Yahoo-ed it, the same thing. Never found it. I finally gave up up this rather fruitless endeavor. Let’s change that. Worthless endeavor.
There could be a few reasons for it but this is all I could think up: People are supremely bored at work and have the patience to mindlessly click on links to articles about subjects only marginally interesting to them, for more than fifty pages of search results. I have no other explanation.
When one is at work, one’s time may be less precious than when one is anywhere else.
Or it could more simply be that there is an inordinate amount of interest in euphemisms and some are willing to go to the “end of the internet” to read every single byte of information collected about these benign expressions which represent something more dire.
Somehow, I doubt that.
Oh, and one more thing. There is one comment on this post. One! If so many people are reading it, you’d think at least a few would say something about it.
It makes me wonder about these statistics.
It also makes me wonder about the future of this blog.