Sporkmonger

This is an aimless (and completely pointless) experiment in web traffic. Colbert featured a google search for the phrase “I Am Not Stephen Colbert” on his show the other day, and I’m just curious how many people will actually Google for it. I’ll post statistics, as interesting or boring as they may be, in about a week.

Please do not directly link to this page or at least use rel="nofollow" if you feel compelled to for some strange reason.

Update: This entry is now ranked as the #1 page on Yahoo for the search. That was quick—less than one day to hit the top spot.

Another Pointless Update: Interestingly, someone else started a Colbert fan blog entitled “I Am Not Stephen Colbert”.

Update: So, in under a week, this page got 454 searches for I Am Not Stephen Colbert, 56 searches for I Am Not Steven Colbert, and 20 searches for “I Am Not Stephen Colbert”. The page itself got 665 hits, and 20 comments within the week. That makes this easily the most popular search query for this site, and makes this page the second most popular on the site. Which isn’t too shabby, considering that its received the same amount of traffic in one week that other pages on my site with actually useful content have received in a year.

Yet Another Update: The actual rerun whacked this page with another 1,530 hits in one night. Total searches so far: 1,805 for I Am Not Stephen Colbert, 297 for I Am Not Steven Colbert, and 47 for “I Am Not Stephen Colbert”. Frankly, I think Stephen would be upset to discover that 16% of his audience doesn’t know how to spell his name. For shame, “Steven” searchers, for shame!

Update: And, wouldn’t you know it, this page now ranks on the first page for the search, ‘colbert stephen’. Fortunately, the other way around still give useful results.

Update: Months later, this page is still significantly more popular than my actual homepage, and the searches are still coming in. The last one was three minutes ago. Never underestimate the Colbert Nation.

Firefox

67%

Safari

19%

Internet Explorer

10%

Camino

2%

Opera

2%

Mozilla

<1%

NetNewsWire

<1%

Galeon

<1%

Epiphany

<1%

Konqueror

<1%

AppleWebKit (Generic)

<1%

Neat-o, I have non-conformist readers. Early on, Epiphany managed to get as high at 10% on my minty browser pie chart. But I can only assume that was the work of probably one or two people, not sure exactly who. I’d probably be all about the Camino myself if only I had a way to get my greasemonkey goodness (mostly because I really need my hoodwink.d and mouseHole isn’t perfect), and maybe also that wondrous web developer FF extension. But alas and alak! It does not appear to be likely to happen anytime soon.

FeedTools 0.2.19 is taking a bit longer than I expected, might be a few more days. I really should have aimed for a smaller release I think. I’m pretty sure this release has the most significant set of code changes so far in terms of just LOC changed. I’ve pretty much had to change every single parsing method in the whole thing. I’m really not sure why I didn’t do it this way to begin with though—just a bad original design choice on my part.