August 10th already!

If I ever start biking, I really want this shirt.

My BIL, is a columnist for the Columbus Dispatch. He has a blog and this is one of his entries:

Taking the high road in search of blog traffic

A friend of mine recently told me that I could get a lot more hits on my blog if I sprinkled my entries with more key words and famous names. By famous names, I assumed he was talking about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan -- the Hollywood party crowd -- and when I mentioned them, he didn't deny it.
"But this is a sports blog," he said. "So I was thinking more along the lines of Wayne Gretzky, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, maybe even O.J. Simpson and Pete Rose, you know, guys like that. And this being Columbus, you might want to throw in Jim Tressel, Earle Bruce and Woody Hayes, too. Or maybe Eddie George, Troy Smith and Hop Cassady. Ohio State football is pretty big, and those names will serve you well. If you sprinkle their names in every blog you write, a lot more people will find it."
This all seemed crazy to me. Maybe it makes sense for Green Bay Packers' fans to find every blog that mentions Vince Lombardi or Bart Starr, but really, that seems a little dishonest, doesn't it? It's like being one of those devious pop-up ads that trick you into going a site to win a free IPhone, Wii or Xbox and then try to sell you Viagra or Cialis.
"Maybe so," my friend said. "But if you do that, you will have a lot more people reading your blogs. I'm telling you, even mentioning a key word or two -- sex or drugs, for example -- and you'll get a lot more traffic. And some of those people you trick into clicking on your site will stop long enough to read your silly little blogs about Barry Bonds, Lloyd Carr or Ty Cobb. It's amazing what a key word can do -- I knew a guy who said he doubled his web traffic just by mentioning Bob Dylan -- although I think his repeated mentions of his trips to Starbucks and and his endorsement of the Sierra Club had more to do with it. He's a big Al Gore fan, and the greens were all over his blog right after he wrote that.
No matter. I absolutely refuse to use a word like "porn" just to get more blog traffic. I'm never going to stoop to mentioning Tom Cruise or Matt Damon in order to get a few more people reading something I've blogged about Browns' quarterback Brady Quinn or Bengals' quarterback Carson Palmer.
Would Joseph Pulitzer have done that? Winston Churchill? George Washington? Pope John Paul II? I'll bet even Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt woudn't go that far.
Could it cost me? Sure. But if no one this side of Afghanistan or Iraq reads this stuff, if I can't connect to all my good friends at Wal-Mart, then that's a chance I'll have to take.
At least I've got my dignity.

Posted by Bob Hunter on August 8, 2007 1:42 PM

Of course, I would have just shown you the link, but I didn't want to take the high road. I guess it runs in the family. If you'd like to visit his blog and leave him a message, you should do so. It would be funny, because he doesn't get many messages so far.

Of course, I could talk about the "naked jogging priest".

Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.~ Chinese Proverb