Blogging this blog: An Inside Look (sort of)

One of the things you do when you start a blog is to find out if anyone is actually reading it, and how do they find your blog (link, search engine, etc). This can be done by using one of many free counters. Most of the readers of this blog come from search engines (mostly Google) and from a number of links from other basketball blogs. However, this was not the interesting part of looking at the visitor counts...

What was interesting was the type of things people were searching for... One of the most popular ones continues to be Josh McRobert's Mom. Apparently Rick Majerus is not the only enthusiastic member of her fan club.

The Coca Cola commercials are quite popular searches as well, both the Virginia Tech (Hokies, you stopped doing your routine and your team lost!), and Roy Williams and his ... Coke habbit.

Another thing I picked up was the number of spammers that try to find email addresses by searching for common names (eg Jones, Smith, etc), and then send them the "you won the lottery" and male enhancement spams. Since player names are mentioned here, they find their way to this blog. So spammers, this is a great email address for you, GoAwaySpammers@StopWastingBandwidthWithYourStupidSpams.com

And then the most entertaing thing are the searches that border on the nosy, the silly and the bizarre. Off the top of my head here are three presented in a Q&A format:

Search Question: "how many wins for an NCAA bid for an Atlantic 10 team"?
Answer: As we have seen last year with George Washington, the number of wins alone is not a factor. The quality of the wins is important. Who did you play, where, when, and how well did you play are among many others factors to consider.

Search Question: "Is Steve Lavin gay?".
Answer: Well, he got married to a woman last summer from what I recall. How did this end up on my blog? Because of a classic Majerus line - one of about 10000 it seems; there is actually a website that tracks Rick Majerus quotes by the way. When evaluating UConn's Rudy Gay, Majerus said: "I'm not a Big Gay Guy" (meaning he is not a big fan of his game). This happened in studio with the camera pointed at Majerus and Lavin. It was almost impossible for Lavin not to start laughing after Majerus said that.

Search Question: Searching for a coaches name and violations, even for coaches who are clean, perhaps hoping of unearthing some dirt on an opposing coach?

If this segment is of interest I will try to remember more of these and write them up on a regular basis. Let me know...