Thursday, September 9, 2010

Explanation Wanted

I just found that I can check the statistics for my blog. No surprise that readership levels seem to be on the wane, since it's been four months since I last updated.

Blogger also has a breakdown of the sites that have referred to my blog -- that is, where people found a link to here. Number one on the list (with a number more at home on a thermometre than on a tally of readership) was Facebook. Either people are clicking the link I have on my FB page, or someone has posted a link to this blog on their FB page; which seems so unlikely that I don't know why I bothered to suggest the idea.

Next on the list is Google.com. People come to my site from search topics as diverse as anecdotes porusski, govoryu po russki, need for speed most wanted russki, and last time it's only cause we need three questions what colour is your eyes?? po russki. It turns out that, for that last search, my blog is the most relevant thing on the Internet.

We have now crossed the line between that makes perfectly good sense to if you want to participate in the Internet, you need to learn to stop finding things weird.

Number three on the list is the homepage for a company called Kompaniya Reinvest -- a name that would be misleading if it looked like it meant anything. KR deals in renovation and construction of residential houses and apartments in and around Moscow.

The logical question to ask here is What? Behind Facebook and Google, the third biggest referrer to my blog is a Russian renovation company called The Reinvest Company? How on earth does one get from there to here in one step?

If I was bewildered by number three on the list, number four makes me want to quit the Internet. I don't even know what it was that I found, but it looks like the homepage of a 15 year-old Russian shut-in, designed using Geocities and a passing familiarity with aesthetics. The front page of the site is a list of links to short articles (most more like paragraphs than articles) on topics that could only be interesting to people who have given up on self-improvement. There is an article on how snoring increases the likelihood of divorce, an article about a man in Novosibersk who illegally painted markings on the road, a collection of photos of people pulling funny faces, and a description of a book of semen-based recipes (not a review, or a link to where to buy the book, just a statement that this book exists). The only external links were to porn and dating sites, and the most prominently displayed of these was a dead link. And halfway down the page were 12 photos of naked women, six with penises, the other half without.

I'm at a loss. What? How? Why?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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