Hello, I’m A Traffic-Whore. Nice To Meet You.

I’m a fairly cynical person, and for the most part I rely on the internet to supply me with the logic and reason that is sadly absent from real life. And no, I’m not being sarcastic. The thing about the internet is that while it’s filled with wackos and perverts, a discerning surfer knows how to avoid those sites and forums like the plague. So while I might be forced to listen to the fuckwit in the Wal-Mart checkout line ramble on about a 9/11 cover-up, if I’m on the internets I can just surf on away from that kind of douchebaggery.

But sometimes the internets bushwack me, and I get a heapin’ helpin’ of full-on loony tunes.

Last Thursday I wrote about Stan Tiger Romanek, the asshat who claims he videotaped an alien. He had a film editor from Denver analyze the tape and determine it was “authentic,” which, from what I can ascertain, simply means that the tape does contain a moving image of some sort. Here’s Romanek on Larry King. Please note, the creature with glasses and suspenders is actually Larry King and not the alleged space alien:

If you aren’t able to tell that Romanek is an complete and total dodo bird from that clip then please, feel free to never stop by Hyperliterature again. I also hope you appreciate the comedy of the “reenactment” videos. They make me think Larry King might have a sense of humor.

I blogged about this story for three reasons: 1) I thought it was an oddball story filled with ridiculous people, and I love making fun of ridiculous people; 2) Several years ago I blogged about my sadness regarding the dearth of recent alien sightings, so I thought the story was serendipitous; 3) I didn’t have anything intelligent to say about substantive issues (which explains why I blog about absolute bullshit most of the time).

So imagine my surprise when that one, stupid blog post resulted in a spike in traffic unlike any I’ve ever seen. I’ve been Dugg before, and the traffic spike from the Stan Tiger Romanek blog post dwarfed the Digg Effect. Most amazingly, the traffic came from individual Google search results and not from forwarding via a social networking site like Digg, Reddit, or Propeller.

With all the frightening things actually occurring in our world that demand out attention, I’m stunned that this stupid story has caused such an uproar.

I also have to admit that the temptation to name-drop “Stan Tiger Romanek” into a post for the sole purpose of generating Google search hits for my site is difficult to pass up. I mean, just think how many hits this sentence could potentially generate: “Yesterday in Iraq, whilst in the midst of lesbian sex, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan declared war on the 9/11 cover-up, while simultaneously requesting anal sex from Stan Tiger Romanek in Israel, pending the consent of President Bush, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Kari from Mythbusters.”

There. That oughta crash the site counter.

Categories: Blogging, Jackassery, Nerdology | 4 Comments

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4 thoughts on “Hello, I’m A Traffic-Whore. Nice To Meet You.

  1. Dude, you’re singing my song.

    I, too, blogged about the story just because I thought it was odd and maybe my friends would find it entertaining.

    Within five minutes of posting a quote from and link to the Denver Post story, traffic started going up on my blog. So I figured I’d better make sure that no one leaked to video to YouTube. When I posted a link to the Larry King appearance, my traffic went up even further.

    After about three days, the traffic dwindled (though it didn’t go away). My blog post had been consistently in the top five hits for searches on “Stan Tiger Romanek”. Then suddenly it was buried five pages down. Fewer hits, but still slightly elevated traffic. For some odd reason, I’m having a surge in traffic today again.

    The traffic patterns are also kind of odd — I think that nearly half of my hits on Monday were from Argentina: I had no hits from Africa or Japan until the second or third day after the post. It’s kind of like learning to read the Matrix by watching the green numbers flashing on the screen.

    And I, too, considered posting something completely off the wall with “Stan Tiger Romanek” in the title, just to see if traffic went back up again.

    Yep. I’ve been going through very nearly the exact same thing.

    Weird, ain’t it?

  2. The sheer idiocy of the story, combined with the apparent public interest, makes me sad. Also, nice little site you got there.

  3. Thanks.

    It amazes me that I’m *still* getting several hits a day from people Googling “Stan Tiger Romanek”.

    On the other hand, I’m also getting hits from people Googling “playboy sex photoes” [sic] and “boy and boysex” (I assume these searches find my blog because the words “play” and “boy” are in the title and I did a posting about Mick LaSalle’s review of “Sex and the City”).

    So I’m fast reaching a point of “I don’t paricularly care why people are coming to my blog as long as they don’t start leaving crazed rants or death threats.”

  4. Oh. Clarification. By “It’s kind of like learning to read the Matrix by watching the green numbers flashing on the screen,” I’m referring to reading traffic reports on Sitemeter.

    You start to notice IP addresses that hit your site repeatedly, then you start looking for evidence for who that represents (comparing hit times to times comments were left).

    You notice that one person from Texas came in on one specific posting from a Google search, then three or four more people from NY and LA hit the same posting without having done any kind of Google search, so you guess that maybe the first person e-mailed your posting to the other three or four.

    You notice that you have no hits coming from Peru, then suddenly there are eight hits in rapid succession from Peru. So you guess that either the story hit Peruvian news or someone in Peru has been mailing the story to their friends (or a combination of both).

    Like I said, it’s like reading the Matrix from the green numbers rolling down the display.

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