I think this is a tad troubling.
Throughout the long and arduous (nice word) winter I would occasionally get a decent BLOG idea. Whenever those rare inspirational moments occurred, I would sign in and jot down the concept. I ended up with 6-7 'nugget of an idea' BLOGs in a pre-development stage. Some of them might turn out, but most will probably be deleted.
What continued to amaze me whenever I did my quick little sign ins; was just how much traffic that the BLOG continued to get in the off-season. I never really expected to see the numbers continue to tic upward as the snow fell. I mean, it can't all be Farah and Doyle, can it?
To give you a frame of reference, the BLOG averaged around 20 hits a day from my last post (November 23rd) until today (March 18th). Not bad. There were only two days in that period that had no traffic, December 23rd and December 25th. Apparently, people got bored on Christmas eve and poked around a little.
So this isn't a rah-rah, ooooh the BLOG is so great post...its a "what the hell is with all the traffic off-season" post. Being the curious sort that I am, I figured that I'd see where people were coming from.
Interesting results. There are a few different sites that measure traffic and other than Canada (2nd most popular), the most hits were from Michigan, Brazil, India, Pakistan, China, Turkey, Nigeria and Russia. I enjoy writing this thing and despite the generally warm feedback; even I'm not arrogant enough to believe that this thing has a following anywhere but here.
So again, why the hits? I decided to dig a little deeper. I checked out the entry pages. The entry page is the first page that people end up on when they come to the site. An overwhelming number of people's first page was the Help The Kids Play BLOG from last year. Now, that was one piece that I was pretty proud of, but I realize that it was unlikely to have international acclaim. There had to be another reason.
For people to land on that page, they must of searched it, right? So what would they search? Tottenham? Oldtimers? If they did that, I would probably get a bunch of hits from England (which does happen from time to time). And even then, there is no guarantee that they'd end up on the Help The Kids BLOG. There had to be something unique about THAT particular page.
When in doubt go to Google. The actual name of that BLOG page is "SPECIAL REPORT - HTKP II - We didn't start the fire". I tried various combinations of the words in the Google search and didn't get much, but then I typed in "HTKP" by itself and our wee little BLOG came back #1 in the Google search! Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to figure out the Google algorithms and get themselves to the top of the search queue; and here we are, reaching that lofty pinnacle without trying. Hardly seems fair.
But as cool as THAT was (you gotta be a geek I guess); my next question would be 'why is it coming to the top of the list' AND the first question remained unanswered...why are people from Michigan, Brazil, India, Pakistan, China, Turkey, Nigeria and Russia even searching on the BLOG or the Help the Kids tournament?
Well, the answer appears to lie in the acronym, HTKP. for us HTKP stands for 'Help the Kids Play.' Apparently the rest of the world (I'm thinking mostly militia and people or groups that are into this kinda stuff and will go unmentioned) for something completely different. It also stands for Hard To Kill Probability or Potential. Just a subtle difference.
In case you didn't quite pick on that, because I was typing fast, definition one is about a philanthropic effort on behalf of our league members to help children; while definition two was more about KILLING!!!
Of course, taking things one step too far I did a search on Hard To Kill Probability and the results were kind of sickening. Nearly 2 million returns and while I didn't check them all, the first few pages were a pretty even mix of 1st person shooter forums from x-box, PS3, etc along with an equal number of military specs and reviews.
So you're kid is playing Call of Duty and looks up a cheat on the internet and falls into a militia site in Michigan. I'm not so sure that's cool. In fact, I don't think its taking a huge political stance to that it isn't cool.
Its almost as bad as those poor militia kids looking up the kill radius of their latest Surface to Air Missile and falling into the Oldtimers site.
Troubling indeed.
