The Scoble Effect

The other day I wrote an article which referenced Scoble and his lack of appearance on Encarta. Robert noticed this  and duly posted.

The basic premise of my post was that while many of us blog-type-folk may think that people like himself are popular, they haven’t really generated true fame and that this blog thing is still really a bit niche. So I wondered what the impact of a popular blog would be on my humble blog.

I try to avoid being to much of a statistics head because I don’t actually write to be noticed, I write for the few people that I know read. I do, however, run statcounter on my site because I do like to look every now and again, and because I like to know which articles people keep going back to.

The last couple of days have been a little busier but only a little. On most days I get 20 to 30 visitors, yesterday 80, the day before 64. OK, in percentage terms it’s a big increase, but that would just be messing about with statistics.

There are clearly a number of possible reasons for this:

• It’s the Christmas season and everyone has already switched off – some effect.
• What I wrote wasn’t very interesting anyway – almost inevitable.
• Scoble isn’t that interesting – too polite to say .
• MSN integration with Encarta isn’t that interesting – not my place to say.
• The problems with typepad meant that I missed all of the visitors – the post was missing for a while waiting to be restored .

It was only a bit of fun anyway, but I do find the whole social engineering, social networking, human behaviour effect fascinating – pity I know so little about it.