Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Linked By Sullivan

It's been almost three months since I started this blog and its been a lot of fun. The motivation was never to get a lot of visitors. Actually, there was no great motivating factor. I just had a few hours to kill at work one night waiting to get our accounting server back up so I started ChiSox Daily.

Nevertheless, I was interested on how many visitors would stop by. I didn't think there would be that many for a couple of reasons. One, I'm writing about the White Sox, which pretty much limits my potential market. Two, I'm not the greatest writer. And three, I don't put in the effort to overcame the first two obstacles.

But I did get some links from some fellow bloggers and a decent amount of traffic. A couple of times I attracted over 50 visitors in one day (well I guess "decent" is relative). But as the baseball season ended traffic slowed down considerably. And judging to the self-referred/bookmark originations, I was down to a select group of regular readers (probably family and friends). I was approaching the 900 total visitor mark but figured I would have to wait a couple of weeks until I reached the 1000 threshold.

That was until I wrote the snarky item below about Josh Marshall's critique of the administration. I sent the post to Andrew Sullivan who linked to it right away. In minutes, I doubled the amount of visitors I had in 2 plus months of existence. I passed 1000, then 2000, then 3000 and on past 6000. I was on cloud nine the rest of the day.

But now I feel a little bit guilty. Like someone who gets rich by playing the lottery. I don't feel like I really earned those visits with the quality of my writing. Its as if they were handed to me, which of coure they were. But like the lottery winner, I don't think I'll be giving my prize back. So as the lottery winner will say he's a millionaire, I guess I'm blogger who averages 80 hits a day.