Anatomy of a meme

If you haven’t already seen it, this site is #2 on Daypop, Popdex, and Blogdex. Since this is my first time with that sort of recognition, I wanted to explain how I got there and what that means for the site. It’s an interesting look at how traffic and memes flow through blogland.

It started when Bill Zeller created his automatic button maker. Knowing that the world prefers a GUI to a command line, I whipped up a quick HTML front end to it.

Simon Willison discovered Bill’s tool and linked to it. That appears to have been the very first link. Then Dean McKenzie was looking at offline blog posting tools and happened across Zempt. He followed a link from Zempt to Bill’s site and saw both the button maker and link to my GUI. He mentioned those to Paulo, who posted them to MetaFilter.

From there, it snowballed. People picked up the links and mentioned them on their own blogs. Since yesterday, over 300 sites have linked to the button maker GUI. Someone created a powerful command line application. I put a simple GUI on it and I ‘m getting all the credit. I feel a bit like Bill Gates. Bill Zeller doesn’t seem to mind that I’m the one on Daypop, etc. We both know that the link wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for him.

Yesterday morning I noticed I’d gotten over 100 referrals from Blogdex, so I went to see what was going on. The button maker GUI was the #4 link.Then later, I started getting traffic from Popdex. Then Daypop. Soon, Blogdex was my number one referrer.

I’ve had pages from this site appear briefly on Blogdex and Daypop, but I’ve never been in the top 20 sites and never for more than an hour or so. I’ve now been in the top 5 on Blogdex for at least 24 hours and the top 5 on Daypop and Podex since I woke up this morning. What surprises me is how little traffic these sites actually provide. Over the last week or two my site has averaged about 2000 page views a day. Over the last two days, I’m averaging 12,000 page views per day. I would have thought that links from MetaFilter, Blogdex, Daypop, and Popdex would have sent more than 10,000 people to the site. Out of all the sites, Blogdex has sent the most visitors so far, but Daypop is climbing fast.