Playing with my Google

posted by my gay husband today

 "We're huge in Belgium."

-- Matt Dillon, playing Cliff, front man for Citizen Dick, in Singles

Today I decided to go down the rabbit hole of who's reading this blog, and when, and from where after my gay husband posted this picture  from Greece, where he's vacationing with my gay husband-in-law.

I like the picture, because I think it makes me look like I took up languages this summer.

Then I started poking around. It turns out, he's not the first or the only reader in Greece. And apparently, I'm big in Australia. (I always suspected as much.) Ukraine, I knew about, because my niece was over there visiting, and I assume her Mom still checked the blog religiously to see if they were missing anything important. Like maybe I had eaten something interesting. (I still call it The Ukraine and am disproportionately irritated that they changed it.)

Chef Baby Brother is just back from Budapest, but there doesn't seem to be a single check-in from there, although there's been a lot of traffic from Denmark and the Netherlands (possibly related to all the posts about Voss Water and IKEA). Don't ask me, I can't be expected to understand the Internets. Or to actually know where Denmark and the Netherlands are. I assume the visits from Russia are that guy who crashed twitter and facebook.

I can tell from looking at the graphs and pie charts that the most popular thing I've ever written is a post about 30 Rock. I'm not going to link to it here -- even though I could. Oh yeah, I don't like to brag, but I know how to -- I taught myself that maybe a year or so ago (sometime shortly after I figured out how to post pictures) -- but I don't really want to encourage anybody who thinks they might be getting a Tina Fey fanzine.

After that, people mostly seem to be reading for: Sam Shepard, bacon, Martha Stewart, and sofas, in order of popularity. That sounds about right to me. 

I see that far more people read me on iPhones than BlackBerry --which means that they now know that I think iPhones are the hot girls from high school,  and that we BlackBerry types are the smart girls with glasses who did the iPhone's homework. That's ok. I'll say it to their face.

As I've said before, I tend to think I know each and every reader -- a population that is comprised in my mind of:  my college roommate's father, Aunt Ronni, and SandraL. And by and large, people do land here from twitter or facebook. I am not sure, however, how people are getting from the Wall Street Journal to here... but they are. Perhaps I have been linked somewhere as a cautionary tale.

Google is, of course, what dumps most of the traffic, and it is perfectly obvious that tons of people land here expecting good advice about how to buy a t-r-u-c-k or what they should watch on r-e-a-l-i-t-y television. (I am spelling it out, because I have realized that if you write blogs about how you are NOT a t-r-u-c-k-i-n-g company or r-e-a-l-i-t-y television site, you will only encourage Google to send more visitors to you who are looking for that kind of thing.

(The title was my friend Matt's idea for the column, over 15 years ago, long before any of us had figured out the implications of s-e-a-r-c-h   e-n-g-i-n-e-s. I am sure blogs existed, but I am equally sure I thought they were something that could be cleared up with Levaquin.)