Getting extrospective for a moment

The 19 Minutes staff has interviewed a few authors in our day who have admitted a certain fascination with watching their Amazon rankings rise and fall -- in the days after doing an interview, when something relevants happens in the news, etc.

We're still working on our own first book (estimated publishing date at this rate: 2017), and thus, we have no Amazon rankings to watch. So instead we must be content with checking out the Sitemeter on our blog. It's one of the little buttons over on the sidebar on the right, and it tells me how many hits this humble feature has received in a given hour, day, week, month, and year. As our budget for large billboards is rather low, so typically is the number of hits in any one hour. But we get a few.

And while we'd be happy to delude ourselves with the notion that there are hundreds of loyal readers out there, anticipating every morsel of wisdom to emanate from the computer keyboards here at the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, the data (and, well, common sense) dictates that plenty of folks have found their way here through various means other than a burning desire to learn what's on our minds.

A few readers make their way here via a link from [sudden use of first person ahead] my bio page in Public Radioland. We don't know what kind of impact that has on fundraising during pledge drive season, or on the high esteem our news department is held in otherwise. We do know, however, that we had more hair when the picture for our bio was taken, so we're happy that people are still visiting that page.

We get plenty of random hits, thanks to the "next blog" feature at the top of many Blogger-hosted sites (such as this one). For those of you who haven't tried that yet, go ahead and do that, but don't forget to hit the "back" button on your browser so you can keep reading this compelling prose. (We just tried it and came up with this piece of Canadiana.) I'm not sure we've converted a lot of blog-browsing readers, but it's entertaining to imagine the reactions of people coming here after reading a porn blog.

And so then, there are the hits from the people that have come across 19 Minutes HQ via the world of search engines, which gives us a nice opportunity to try to remember which blog posting mentioned "The Electric Orgasm". (And then an opportunity to cringe when we re-read the old posting.)

But this is actually the kind of hit that pleases us (What? Pleases us more than a random event caused by hitting a button on someone else's site?), because it means that we're not the only ones thinking about odd uses for Underarmour, where the heck Yilida is, and above all, Spudnik the Space Potato. (Okay, we'll stop before this turns into one of those sitcom episodes that are really just a bunch of highlights from old shows. I mean, do you believe they paid Jennifer Aniston a zillion dollars to look pensive for two seconds before "Friends" went to a flashback?)

And someday, we'll blog about those great-but-bizarre old Carvel Ice Cream commercials that were ubiquitous on east coast televisions through the 1970s and '80s. Someone's gotta be thinking about Fudgie the Whale. (Come on, we plan to write. Even the Carvel people have to know they were weird - why else would they post a whole bunch of them on the Carvel website?) We'll get hits from people Googling "Carvel+commercials". And that'll please us.

But hey, at least our sense of self-worth isn't tied to the hit counter. Not much, anyway.

(Fudgie the Whale? And what was the deal with that "Cookie Puss" guy?)