Another thing I've learned about blogging Since the primary audience of this blog consists of students who are themselves blogging, I'm occasionally going to post about unusual details I've noticed in this process. Outside of kent.edu and rr.edu domains, both of which are probably associated with local readers, most of my traffic seems to come from google searches.

At first, these searches were often driven by unusual mis-spellings, such as "seraches" for searches, in those cases where someone making a google search makes the same mistake as the blogger, Google will tend to connect them up.

Beyond that, there are a few simple phrases which generate a lot of hits for me. In this case, that includes variations on "Illinois Nazis" and "employee tardiness".

The first is a Blues Brother reference, but the Blues Brother's are pre-internet, so any references to catch phrases in that movie will tend to be less common then memorable details from more obscure Southpark episodes. I imagine that many people following the link to me are either wondering on the origin of the phrase, or are looking for some mid-eighties nostalgia. In either case, my blog satisfies. On the otherhand, they may really be looking for information about Nazis in Illinois, in which case, I have nothing of any insight to add.

"employee tardiness" is also a somewhat archaic way of speaking. I imagine that someone following up this phrase will be looking for information about what to do when people keep showing up for work. I have nothing to say about this matter, what's interesting is that none of the sites offering commentary or insight on management practices have anything to say about it either. Or if they do, they're more obscure than this site, at least as measure in google rank. I'm already on the first page returned for "employee tardiness". After this current post, in which the phrase "employee tardiness" is used many times, I'll probably own the phrase "employee tardiness", and yet I have absolutely nothing to say on the topic. I first used the phrase "employee tardiness" here. (note, the quotes are important, the management sites do have something to say about the unquoted form, I'll consider the possibility of a use-mention problem here someday when I'm really really bored.)

The moral, if you're blogging for the first time and you want people to read what you write, regardless of their interest, then mispell words and use outdated phrases.  ¶ #

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