Tipping Point

I was up for a major shock yesterday. From time to time I check my traffic statistics of this blog to see whether any of my friends are still checking upon me... I normally have a couple dozen hits a day, most of them coming from stray Google searches who stay for a couple of milliseconds before leaving for something better. I understand this well, as this blog is actually meant for close friends and family who know me and from time to time check upon my latest state of mind and activity (or absence of it).

For some time now though, I have been getting quite a number of hits on an article I wrote about Gladwell's Outliers. That was back in November 2008 when I posted it. I must say, I felt great about that book and I just wanted to tell the world about it! So I posted that blog! Like a review, that was. Much I knew then!

Turns out that article as of yesterday became a 'huge' pole of attraction to this site, after all! It has also attracted the maximum number of comments that I ever had before, and seems that yesterday we reached a peak of 314 hits (!) in a day (see graph hereunder)! I get less than this in a good month for crying out loud! Wow! I mean, this is seer tipping point stuff (another bestseller by Gladwell, BTW). This Pagerank thing moves in mysterious ways. It appears that if you go like 'Gladwell Outliers IQ test' on Google, this article shows up on their hit list in the top five positions! Sometimes it's the first hit! Wow! I mean, I hardly get 300 hits in a month, and yesterday I had more than that in a day! Maybe, one of the reasons is that I have attempted to 'solve' the riddle Gladwell describes in his book and of course my solution must be way out dumb wrong but nevertheless I saw some readers suggesting better solutions, etc... Funny that so many folks out there still get intrigued by tests of 'intelligence', innit? In any case, I believe Gladwell must have scored another bestseller worldwide with his Outliers book!

So far this morning the hit stands at about 80+, which is four times a good day's average and we are not yet thru the first half of the day (by my location's measures), it's a normal week day after all, and the US is only now getting ready to wake-up in the East Coast! Cool! I bet you we may reach more than 200 hits by midnight here!

On a serious note, I'd really like to learn how pagerank works! I mean, I know the basics, but, why now? It was like a storm! I'm curious to see how long it will take this to subsede and fall back to the old stats, if ever... Would also be interesting to experiment with some other subjects too. Let's be honest... that article was no rocket science whatsoever and solved no riddles at all. It's not even a fair review of Gladwell's work (I'm not a professional reporter as most of you already know). Why Google ranks decided to pull it up so high is anybody's guess. Anyone more knowledgeable of the intricacies of search engines, please comment!

In the meantime, my ego is enjoying the traffic. 'How vain your are...' my dearest spouse remarked yesterday... Whatever...