Best laid blogs of mice and everyone else

Blog post popularity is a bit of a mystery to most bloggers.



Which posts will become heavily viewed and linked by other bloggers is entirely in the realm of guess work.



No amount of crystal ball gazing, tea leaf reading, or random chants into cyberspace will provide accurate predictions of blog post interest by others.



You might as well forget the forecasting game, and simply write what you want, and leave it at that once you're finished.



The feeling is common to all bloggers. That tremendous well researched posting on the critical issue of the day falls flat.



Clunk.



No one links to it, despite its well reasoned arguments and its extensive reasearch into the arcanery of our time. The fact you just happen to think it's Pulitzer Prize winning material seems to hold very little sway on the readership either.



On the other hand, you were tired, not feeling well, and on the verge of not posting anything at all that day. Sitting at the keyboard, all that appeared was what looked like a throw away rambling series of thoughts partially full of a bit of sound, little fury, and signifying considerably less than nothing.



What happened?



Technorati displays dozens of citings of the post, and the blog's visitor counter proves the page to be one the blogger's most read posts ever.



All for a post that on the surface, seemed pointless and worse than painfully flawed.



Why does that phenomenon occur in blogging circles?



I'm sure a few enquiring minds want to know, or at least see it as a potential diversion.



Not that a diversion is a bad thing. That's what made society great, or at least almost so, in the first place.



One possibility is the tossed off at the last possible second blog contains the real blogger. Instead of cold and dry facts, the writer's personality lands on smack on the page.



The well researched thesis could, in reality, be so dull and boring that by comparison, paint dry watching turns into the equivalent of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.



Besides, some people don't read all blogs for facts and numbers and data and other duller than the average dishwater matters. Instead, many blog readers want, and some even crave, a morsel of character and personality in the blog lines.



Of course, the great post could simply have appeared on a busy day in the blogosphere, but that is a topic for another day.



Besides, it might blow my fractionally baked, non-researched, top of the head, tossed off at the last millesecond, post right out of the virtual water.



We wouldn't want that, now would we.



Oh...link freely to this post.



I need my rather shaky theory validated.



Kind of like parking.