581 Lawrence O'Donnell and my blog

When I checked my site meter the last several days I discovered that searches for Lawrence ODonnell (MSNBC) accounted for about half of all google searches that directed to my blog. That's odd, I thought. I mentioned him on October 23 after he'd gone bonkers over Swiftboat Vets and was screaming "Liar," but had no idea what he'd done recently. Well, apparently he's really gone off the deep end again (or, as usual?) and suggested the blue states secede. So that probably caused all the google searches, which in turn caused a ripple at my web site.

I hope someone has shown him the county maps. The counties would have to secede, not the entire state. Look at Illinois. It would appear that the Chicago suburbs went for Bush, but the St. Louis suburbs (in Illinois) went for Kerry, even thought the metropolitan counties are strongly blue. Bush won 2.51 million sq. miles with 150.9 million population, and Kerry won 511,700 sq. miles with 103.6 million people. And the red counties have all the agricultural land! What will the blue counties eat? And what movies will those of us in the red counties see? Oh dear, we've lost Hollywood. How tragic.

Do the number of hits on a blog matter? For those who sell ads, absolutely. There is an entire cottage industry of bloggers and software that count and evaluate blogs. "The current arbiter of the blogosphere as a whole is the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, an index of registered blogs whose evolutionary animal metaphor implies an ecological logic at work. Blogs are ranked by incoming links from other blogs registered in the Ecosystem making this a good analogy for a closed, but ever expanding, ecosystem operating in wider ecologies of the Internet. Blogs are ranked hierarchically from top predator InstaPundit described as a Higher Being down through tiers including Playful Primates, Flappy Birds, Lowly Insects all the way to Insignificant Microbes that subsist without a single incoming link to their name. Despite the animal metaphors the Ecosystem might be thought of as a Great Chain of Being as much as assertion of Linnean relationships. This is not only a description of energy flows but a catalogue of varying social status and influence in the blogosphere." Into the Blogosphere article. It is interesting to check out Bear and search the various blogs you like to read.

When I changed my site meter to not count my own visits to my site, there was a huge drop in the charts at Bear (I was already crawly scum), but there doesn't seem to be any standard for this-- whether you count yourself as a visit. But without my own visits, I get about 70 page hits a day.