Friday, August 29, 2014

Scunthorpe Effect

by Tuxyso - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons 
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 
We dropped The Egg (the child formerly known as The Boy) off at college earlier this week, then returned to welcome our own new students.  I spent yesterday morning advising first year students in a Harry Potter like hall,  this afternoon at a safety refresher (how long does it take a lab coat to catch on fire?) and various moments in between fielding placement emails and finalizing my syllabus.

Math Man has gone off after work today to play golf, it's a gorgeous afternoon by any measure and I've settled down on the patio to catch up on some writing.  The blog stats showed a huge increase in hits today.  My post entitled "Magic Kingdom," which while about California is not about Disney's Magic Kingdom, appears on the first page of Google search results for the last week.  Hence, I am a prime target for blog spam.

In search of a term for the inadvertent use of high traffic search terms (blog homographs?), I discovered the Scunthorpe Problem, named for the North Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe whose residents found themselves blocked from AOL because their town name included an unfortunate string of letters (characters 2 through 5).


6 comments:

  1. I wrote a blog post once on crows. It's got the most page views ever, from people looking for nothing else remotely related to my blog.

    Your experience is comforting. ;-)

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    1. My most visted page is one titled "Can you microwave duct tape?" -- which doesn't actually answer the question! I'm comforted by your crows :)

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  2. A city near us named Toppenish fell victim to the same effect ...

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    1. Too funny! And I had to read the name a couple of times to figure that out.

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  3. When I read "We dropped The Egg" my strange mind had me hoping that although The Egg had been dropped, I hope he wasn't broken. But then when we drop our children off and leave them, it is much harder on us than on them - so perhaps it was Mom and Dad who felt a little broken. :)

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    1. That play on words was unintended, Lynda...but I do like it! And yes, it may be harder on us than on them.

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