Scoobie Doobity Doop Boop

The post below was ready to go – I was ready to hit “publish” – when I got a phone call from my brother. Just as we were doing the greeting thing, his girl Tracey said something in the background, and Jim said “Oh! Wow. Blossom Dearie died.”

As you’ll see, I had just been writing about Blossom Dearie – not about her, but about the high number of hits this blog received for the post with her song in it.

Isn’t that weird?

I don’t know a ton about Ms. Dearie – I love this song she wrote about John Lennon, and had been looking her up online,  intending to buy a couple of her records at the itunes store to check the rest of her work out.

And now she’s gone, coincidentally, and I want to wish her soul well. I hope John Lennon is waiting for her when she gets to heaven. Here’s the original inane thing I was going to post.

-mz

Looking at the stats of your blog is a weird exercise. Where people come from is interesting, to a degree, and how many is gratifying, but finding out which posts people actually read is the most entrancing: Why one post and not another? Sometimes it’s semi-predictable: posting something that isn’t anywhere else means it’ll show up high up in a search, so visits due to that are going to happen. But some posts generate huge bursts of visits, and often these are curious.

Last summer this irrelevent and untimely blog was on hype machine’s top-something for a week or so, because of all the people visiting to hear or grab Hip Hop by Dead Prez – a track I assumed would have been well-covered. They’re no small act, and it was no new song.

Another post – the simplest sort of post possible, with just a “hey, this exists” note and a link to the then-new Sesame Street streaming video site – got huge numbers. Anyone searching for that would just Google it, right? So why would anyone click my link rather than the prominent Sesame Street link itself?

(Of course, all of this raises the spectre of the worst part of writing on the internet: you can be pretty sure that a large portion – say, almost all – of your “readers” are not reading much. More often than anything, they’re linking to pictures, or linking to songs, or downloading things. People use the internet way more than they read it. I’m not complaining, not really. But it takes the wind out of your sails when you notice.)

The Blossom Dearie song “Hey John” is getting a lot of traffic, pretty consistently. It is the only song that I have posted more than once – first when I got it from Tracey, and next to commemorate JLs most recent deathday. It’s an incredible song – really tasty and realized – but still, I don’t know why it gets the amount of traffic it gets. I do not imagine it’s getting typed into Google a lot. Maybe it is.

If anyone visits and knows any of the answers, I wouldn’t mind hearing.