Hit Me Baby One More Time

britney. Originally uploaded by digitalmercenary.

I promised a post-mortem of the Britneyfication of one of the blog entries. If you missed it, it was a simple experiment. Would inserting Britney Spears into a post increase reader figures? It was inspired by the Britney Spears guide to Semi-Conductors and Elliot Back’s own experiment with Britney. Could someone use Britney Spears like a Trojan horse. Get carried through by Britney and the pop out to mass attention? It turns out the answer is yes.

But could I? I primed an entry with suitable key phrases. If you look closely you might see one or two. I then added a Britney Style Sheet and changed the name to “The Britney Spears Site of, like, Really Old Stuff” for a day.

The results were mixed. In terms of search engine hits, I got a couple from Technorati, but over the longer term it seems to have sunk without a trace – which is not necessarily a bad thing. What it did get was readers from other sites who saw it and thought it a good idea. So the mention from the BritBlog roundup was completely unexpected. A couple of days ago I also got a brief mention on a Spanish website, which I’ve since lost the URL of.

However in terms drawing in readers the Britneyfication was a bit of a waste of time. Far more successful has been submitting entries to blog carnivals. At the same time as Britney was on site, I was getting more hits from the Carnival of the Godless, a collection of atheist posts, after submitting “Isn’t the Gospel of Saint Mark Wonderful”. The Tangled Bank, History Carnival, Skeptics Circle and Carnivalesque all bring in readers, as do the mentions when I get them in Rogue Classicism.

I’m happier about that. If reader figures were the reason for writing then I’d be wasting my time writing about the past. It’s more about practicing writing for me, and looking at what people in cognate fields are doing. It might mean I have a smaller readership, but I’d far rather have quality rather than quantity visiting the site. —–