molly.com
Saturday 15 January 2005
the accidental blogger
THE ACCIDENTAL BLOGGER is what I’m going to call what happens when a blogger writes a post that accidentally becomes far more important to their site than ever intended.
I certainly never intended that racing frogs and the death test would be among popular threads frequented by readers that have nothing to do with me or my primary interests, but there you have it: I’m an accidental blogger.
Has this happened to you?
Filed under: blogging
Posted by: Molly | 1:33 pm |
January 15th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
My most commented on post was the photo meme… Where I asked readers to list three thing they’d like a picture of and I’d take a picture and post it (which was a lot of fun and I might consider doing it again).
I have another set of posts that come to mind that seem to get a lot of comments despite the fact that one of the posts is over a year old and most of the time I delete the comments when they come into my bin… It’s a post I made on how I thought the Rock for Life organization’s message was un-Christian… and that’s gotten some rather nasty comments…
I dunno if that would make me an accidental blogger though.
January 15th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
Yep. I never expected my scalable rounded edges article (which I actually wrote for a specific individual) to be mentioned on so many sites.
January 15th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Indeed. I posted about The Asian tsunami disaster before the full extent of the disaster was known. The number of visitors who came to that document were actually so many they were able to seriously skew my usual browser stats, even though IE visitors were served 1/7 of the hits other browsers were for a single request.
January 15th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
My biggest accidental blogger was a post about Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor. Being a native Californian that only moved out here to the Midwest about 4 years ago, I was quite amazed that he was running. The 2nd funniest part of the whole thing is that I mispelled ‘governor’ by spelling it without the “r” - ‘govenor’, and yet the mispelled word ‘govenor’ was in most search engine queries that brought people to the article.
But the funniest part of the whole thing, by far, is that over half of the comments left were addressing Arnold directly, some even in the form of letters to him and at least one requesting he visit the commenter and her spouse in Ohio!
January 15th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
Sort of. I don’t really have a primary focus with my site, and that is quite intentional. However, I didn’t exactly intend an entry that is simply a verbatim copy of an email forward to be my most popular piece…
January 15th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
I got pissed about the embed tag, slipped it into a post at: Link to post and ended up being quoted by a macromedia employee. Link: Macromedia Post
January 15th, 2005 at 8:54 pm
Molly the Accidental Blogger
Molly: “THE ACCIDENTAL BLOGGER is what I’m going to call what happens when a blogger writes a post that accidentally becomes far more important to their site than ever intended.”…
January 15th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
I was writing about Google ads today, and noted that one of my most popular entries is (understandably) all about Michelle Branch’s ass.
January 16th, 2005 at 5:34 am
A logical chalenge (in portuguese)
January 16th, 2005 at 7:32 am
I bloged about Halo 2 back in May and thanks to Google the comments have become a Halo 2 Forum!
January 16th, 2005 at 10:24 am
While I have started to gain a few useful tutorials, one that was a complete joke was referred to by about.com. I didn’t really get as many referrals as I expected to. It seems like all of my less thoughtful posts end up getting the most comments. This makes me question the quality over quantity philosophy.
January 16th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
I wrote a post criticizing AOL 9.0 Optimized and Google had it at or near the top for the longest time (currently on page 3) when searching for AOL 9 or AOL 9.0 Optimized, and I had a bunch of people from AOL and those who were wondering about it comment on the post. I even got a couple of emails from representatives of AOL (at the time AOL used Google’s search engine, not sure if they still do, hence my post was near the top for the search) that weren’t pleased with my post, and one of them asked me to take it down. I told him if he can refute the points I made, I’ll be glad to take it down. Never got an answer back.
Needless to say, the post became an interesting newbie-fest, with people either thanking me for warning them away, or flaming me. I had no idea the post would get that much attention.
January 16th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Matt, if only all of us could be so lucky as to alert the attention of AOL. Personally, the post that draws the most traffic to my site is a riddle that I posted to keep my readers busy while I was on a month long hiatus.
January 16th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
Mine was quite by accident, and it wasn’t a particular post, but simply a turn of events.
Since my blog is mostly political, I did mention John Kerry a few times during the 2004 election year. And since the site is called “What a Butthole,” Google sent me a bunch of visitors with the search phrase “John Kerry is a butthole.”
Just a combination of things, really. Even funnier, thought is the fact that if you type in “Keith Burgin is a butthole,” you get the same results.
January 17th, 2005 at 1:50 am
I run a christian discussion board for college students, and somehow we became the biggest place to find ‘office space avatars’
January 17th, 2005 at 8:38 am
I guess The case for XHTML became a bigger success than I had expected… I found links to it all over the web, one week later.
Pity I haven’t really had time to do any blogging since then.
I need to get back in gear, darnit! 
January 17th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
Yeah, ya do, Faruk!
January 18th, 2005 at 3:47 am
Haha, Seth, you’ll leave no opportunity unused to prod me into action, will you?
Good thing though - I need people kicking me in the behind to do more, but I’m keeping it off until I finish the initial stage of my CMS’s development. Then, once that’s done, I’ll have plenty of time to write articles and blog posts and what not.
Maybe I’ll even be an accidental blogger for a second time! who knows, eh?
January 18th, 2005 at 2:26 pm
Yes that has happened to me Molly, but then again you might not have wanted this post to be so long too lol!!! Great site by the way
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May 16th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
American Journalism Review has an article about this exact thing, http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=3841 The Accidental Blogger
August 27th, 2005 at 9:56 am
Word Choice May Haunt Your Blog
December 7th, 2005 at 6:18 am
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December 7th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
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December 7th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
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December 8th, 2005 at 2:37 am
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December 13th, 2005 at 6:10 am
music video codes 3 doors down
the accidental blogger
January 31st, 2006 at 11:25 pm
[…] BACK IN JANUARY of last year, I wrote a post about what I call the Accidental Blogger Effect. Essentially, this is the phenomenon of writing a blog post and it becoming a central albeit unintentional focus of your site. […]
February 12th, 2006 at 7:55 am
index-parent-fall-out-boy-mp3
the accidental blogger
February 16th, 2006 at 11:53 am
what about the “accidental website” ? I finally created a portfolio site for myself and all of my hits are coming from people who googled “june allison.”
I’d be flattering myself if I thought all those people were indeed looking for me. Most likely they are looking for info on the actress “June Allyson”
I’m starting to feel obligated to put something better on my meager site…with all the unintentional traffic I’ve been getting.
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:53 pm
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August 30th, 2006 at 9:51 am
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October 31st, 2006 at 5:39 pm
hasn’t happened to me personally but I’ve seen a few other posts get a lot more attention than they probably should have!
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