Making the Connection

February 2008 (Photo credit: mickebear)

Daily Prompt: The Stat Connection

Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it.

The stats page gives me a headache so I rarely open it up, but today I’ll make an exception for the sake of the Daily Prompt.  My most popular post of all time happened on February 27th of this year, the momentous day on which almost 600 people popped by to view whatever nonsense I was going on about on that particular day, even though it was nothing new or different or even particularly clever.  A normal day here appears to be about 60 views.  The stats page doesn’t tell us what percentage of these views are purely accidental, but I suspect it’s at least half.

I’m no statistician but that has never stopped me from making wild conjectures on any blog related topic.  And let’s face it, all topics are fair game when it comes to the blogging world.  What I’m pretty sure happened on February 27th is the WordPress Statometer got hit by lightning, resulting in a power surge and scrambled stats for this blog for all time.  My other theory, in case that one isn’t right, has to do with tags.  People search for the damnedest things.  Apply all the recommended tags even if they don’t make any sense in relation to whatever you’ve written, and see what happens.  Or you could just mention Johnny Depp. That one is pure magic.

My top 3-5 posts and pages include my home page/archives, the oxymoron poem (which I wrote from memory and had nothing at all to do with creating), my May Post for Peace (begging the question – what’s wrong with the rest of the months?) a couple of book and movie reviews, and a post in which I mentioned astrology, horoscope and tarot cards. 

The magic connection here is brain fog.  I am convinced that all of my followers suffer from it.  Except you of course.  You and I are perfectly normal.  The stats prove that.  I haven’t yet figured out exactly how they do that, but they don’t lie.  That’s all we really need to know.

English: American actor Johnny Depp. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The final mystery today that even the stats people might have difficulty solving is why the media gallery thought this post required a picture of some random bald guy wearing a curtain.  Surely more interesting things have occurred in the month of February.  Or maybe not.  I am now being prompted to apply a cartomancy tag to this post, even though I  have only a vague notion of what that might be, and the spell checker is telling me I haven’t spelled it correctly.

My point is…. in blogging, the pursuit of connectivity can make you cry.  I strongly advise against it.  Just mention Johnny Depp at every possible opportunity, and your stats will eventually go right off the charts.