Which Way to Voxford?
My good friend John Kelly, a tenured lumberjack journalist [my new term for those who chop down trees to publish words], has a hilarious piece in The Guardian. It’s about how people find his blog.
Kelly, a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post, has been whiling away the months as a visiting scholar at Oxford, studying citizen journalism or some such rot. His blog, Voxford, is full of sharp observations from the psychic border shared by the US and the UK. To read it during lunch is to risk spattering your screen with bits of tuna fish from laughing out loud.
Anyhow, his Guardian story is about the strange search queries that bring people to his blog. Since he’s so close to Fleet Street, his blog is full of references to the sort of goofy smut you find in the British tabs. Some of the searches that have brought people to Oxford include:
Penis grab off
How to grab a woman’s breast without getting caught
Why does my groin, face, beard and head itch?
Picture of tourist diarrheaing
I’m afraid my own U.S. based blog can’t compete with that. I do well with “scariest video on the web” and “hillary widget,” but that’s the best I have.
Of course, now that I’ve used the same words in my blog–I refer to penis, breast, groin, and diarrheaing, among others–I may get some of that traffic too.
Which I think answers the question raised by the only other marginally exotic search that led people to my blog: “web blogging is it really as good as eve…”?
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Web 2.Oh. . .really? 
22, April, 2008 at 11:40 am
I get “sleep fuck” and “12-year-old girl’s panties” a lot. It’s creepy. I also got “should I put my teen son back in diapers for leaving crap marks in his underwear?” which made my year.