Internet Fame
Kevin Drum, responding to a post at Obsidian Wings, proposes an interesting metric for measuring Internet fame: the number of Google hits one gets divided by the number of hits David Brooks gets. “James Joyner,” for example, nets only .45 brooksies. (I get 1.05 brookies if I add in hits for “Outside the Beltway,” but a rather sizable number of those don’t refer to my blog.)
Kevin does the research on some popular blogs and celebrity figures. One wonders if President Bush can surpass Britney Spears in his second term?
Well, Let’s be fair to YOU, James…
“David Brooks” isn’t exactly a rare name, and thereby the number of hits he gets may be distorted by references to ‘David Brooks” which may not refer to the Times Colmnist.
Cute idea. Bithead has a good point though.
“Jay Solo” .219
“Accidental Verbosity” .322
“Carnival of the Capitalists” .128
But it’s pointless to try this with my real first and last or middle and last names, and even the first one above is partially false hits.
True all around. Google searches are an amusing metric but hardly foolproof. Indeed, while “James Joyner” isn’t a common name, most of the results are still for other James Joyner’s. And, of course, minus the quotation marks, “my” results would be much higher.