There have been many 'strange stat' days in the short history of this blog. Today was one of them.
Some of you reading this may say, well, you just went HOT on Sphinn. That wasn't it. Others know we're seen fairly often on TechMeMe. Not today.
This is almost funny, but also a lesson of sorts.
About 9:30 this morning, my wife called and said "I can't get into my e-mail". Barb is a Hotmail user and I'm a Gmail user. I tried accessing Hotmail and I couldn't get there either, or to our beta Office Live Test.
I put a couple of direct 'Twitters' out to a friends in the Northeast (at the time thinking that it was probably regional). Everyone was going up then down, etc. with Hotmail, Live.com and other MS sites.
Not being one to rush to a headline, I waited about 45 minutes and then posted the first piece on the Hotmail outage to this blog. Then followed it up, on and off for a few hours... and made a few updates. (That's the cool thing about Feedburner - You can re-write an entire piece when necessary).
Google (I guess they like us? :) dynamically indexes this blog in the main index. I've mentioned it before.
I'm not going to reproduce the entire Feedburner page here, and the day's not over?.
62.7% of our reads today, as of this screen capture (at 11 PM EST Feb 26) came from the Google main index for terms such as "Hotmail down" earlier in the day.
Coincidentally, I just read a great piece where Glen Allsopp interviewed Lee Odden, Neil Patel, Shana Albert and Jane Copland . This is a GREAT example of everyone in that article is talking about. On an average day, 72 per cent of this blog's hits come from other sites or feed readers.
Today was a whole different story.
I have no idea (nor do I care) if we 'broke the story'. We were early. Google indexed it, and it proved something important to me, particularly about blog story labels and traffic.
Don't discount search !
As mentioned in the previous version of this piece, our hope was that our previous SMX West article will catch the 'same day spotlight' here as well. The live blogging gang is doing a great job at SMX!. At this hour 90+ hits out to those sites at this hour. Not a bad deal.
