March 5, 2007

Thanks, Al

In my five-plus years of blogging, I've experienced a number of "Instalanches" and even had a few of my posts linked by the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com and Howard Kurtz's media column on WashingtonPost.com, and I've seen big traffic spikes each time. But nothing like the traffic in the last week over the Al Gore-Energy-Hog story. Nothing I've ever written has ever gone national and international the way this post did. How big? Before the Gore story, this blog, according to Technorati, had inbound links from 332 other blogs. Today, it has links from 460.

As for traffic, during the entire month of February this blog was visited by 28,203 different people at least once during the month. As of about noon on Monday, March 5, this blog has already been visited by 23,861 people. A whopping 23,488 of them read the above-linked Feb. 28 post, titled The Profit of Doom. Collateral damage: More than 9,000 of them clicked the link from that post to my next post, which discussed how Tennessee's governor wanted to give $200 million to the highly profitable Toyota corporation but can't find $39 million to cut Tennessee's outrageous sales tax on groceries.

And here's the amazing part: Drudge did the Gore story but linked to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's press release, not to anything I wrote here at BillHobbs.com. And when Rush Limbaugh mentioned the information in my Profit of Doom post, he didn't direct his listeners here, but instead sent them to my similar post at the Ecotality.com blog, which also saw a huge surge in traffic and links.

That time I voted for Gore back during the 1988 Texas Democratic primary (because George H.W. Bush's victory was a foregone conclusion in the Lone Star State) finally paid off.