Mindless Blog Popularity

Here are the ten most popular non-carnival entries on Aardvarchaeology for 2007.

1. Djurhamn Sword Excavated
2. Stockholm Art Shows
3. Scandinavian Attitudes to Nudity
4. Wish I Could Do That in Linux
5. Lamprey's Spinal Cord Modelled
6. Djurhamn Sword
7. Star Wars Lego Girls
8. Toys to Teach Little Girls Their Place
9. Indecipherable Punk Reactions
10. Subway Beggar Retaliation

These ten have been popular for very different reasons. I'm happy to see such interest in one of my archaeological finds, viz. an early-16th century sword (#1, #6). But I'm not too thrilled to find that most of the top-10 entries are only on the list because of Google Image Search and porn surfers.

#2 has pix by Sally Mann and Alphonse Mucha, and I can't shake the feeling that a lot of people are searching for Sally Mann's photography because she did a lot of nude studies of her kids back in the day. The entry also contains the words "child nudity" in a non-pr0n context.

#3 is about nudity in the abstract without any illustrations. Merely using the word always draws the punters. This entry also enjoys daily hits from the users of a web forum for nudists.

#4 treats another sensitive subject where people have extremely strong opinions: Linux.

#5 is a bit of a surprise. My buddy Mikael Huss wrote his PhD thesis about virtual lampreys. Whenever somebody needs a picture of a surfeit of lampreys, they now apparently grab it off my blog entry about Mikael's work.

#7 is about Star Wars, Lego and girls, all perennial subjects of interest.

#8 is probably popular because the words "teach little girls their place", which I used ironically, are googled a lot non-ironically by twisted individuals.

#9 has a picture of GG Allin.

#10 describes a practical joke a friend of mine pulled off.

To sum up, we learn yet again that page views are really not the same thing as readership. Only four of the entries on the top-10 are popular because people really want to read what I've written or see pics I have taken. The rest are just artefacts of the search engines.

With this in mind, I've replaced the "Popular Entries" heading on the menu bar above with "Best of Aard", selected by fuzzy criteria. Dear Reader, if you have a favourite Aard entry you'd like newcomers to read, please tell me in a comment!