Every Now and Then, YouTube, You're Okay

"Soulja Boy off in this oh
Watch me crank it, watch me rollWatch me crank dat, Soulja BoyThen Superman dat oh"

That's art, man.

Googling Your Birthday

Step 1: Find something on the internet you'd like to try

Step 2: Follow the instructions

Step 3: . . . . . . . . . . . .

[That's right, I Google Siegfried Wischnewski in my free-time.]

Step 4: Accept that you're a sociopath.

Thanks, Internet. You Work Weird

I know a little bit about SEO, and I consider my blog somewhat more successful than average, but every now and then, the way the internet works just surprises me.

I just finished my second best month ever in terms of readership, thanks to a couple of random flukes (the first best month, by the way, came from having StumbleUpon sending 1,700 people to my blog in one day--also kind of a random fluke). 

Fluke of the month #1: Sometime towards the end of May, all the EFY kids came to Provo. They bore down on us like a swarm of pre-pubescent squirrels with ADHD who were trying really hard to impress members of the opposite squirrel gender (seriously EFY kids, if you were to take a moment and look at all of you from the outside-in, you'd realize that you're trying waaay too hard to impress people). And for whatever reason, about 654 people Googled "EFY kids" and came to my blog to look at this image:

This happens to be on the first page of my 'efy kids' Google image search.

I find this ironic, because I didn't make this image. Some dude on the BYU Memes Facebook page did. All I did is find it and share it. And my blog went crazy for it.

Then, last week, another 141 people came to my blog in one hour, just because someone posted about my BYU Memes post to the Cougarboard.

So this is what the last month on my blog has looked like:

So here's what I find so weird about this - last month, I put up two Draw Something Posts (here's the first one about Hitler, and here's the second one about Batman). Both of them have drawn quite a few people to my blog. These two posts contain orignal art that I'm fairly proud of.

However, the biggest traffic driver to my blog was a post where I just copied a bunch of other people's jokes onto my blog. In academia, this is called plagiarism.

The second biggest driver to my blog was someone else telling people that I did a really good job at plagiarizing other people's work!

By the way, this is exactly how Reddit works.

The moral of this story is that my original content will never be as compelling as someone else's, and that the internet rewards plagiarism.

Thanks, internet?

Safe Search?

So I was working on creating illustrations for the Primary Children's Keyboard Songbook a while ago (by the way, MormonMarket.com is having a wicked Christmas sale right now, so you should check it out!).

Anyway, I needed a reference for the front cover, so I decided to go to Google and do an image search of a young child participating in the activity I wanted to paint.

Have you ever said something really stupid or offensive without thinking about it, and then as soon as it comes out of your mouth you realize you've made a huge mistake?

Yeah, so this was kind of like that, only a little more colorful.




I learned that day that there are some things you can type into Google that will turn up interesting results no matter how strict the safe search setting on your computer are.