Tuesday, October 04, 2005

I am not Zaphod, or, How unpopular is it possible to be?

In the blogverse I have done that narcissistic little experiment akin to googeling yourself in the greater internet. I looked up “who links to me” and added their link to my site (down the bottom go look now, but come back, I’ll still be here).

This is what I found.

I am nothing.

Zaphod may have stepped into the The Total Perspective Vortex and realised that* he was the most important being in the universe but I live the crushing reality that, in terms of my reciprocated contribution to or rather from the web, I am a nothing; see:

i am nothing

I’m writing this blog for 2 + 1** reasons. Firstly because knowing about technologies like blogs it is what I do for a living and secondly to put a few photos up for friends and family, mostly of Baby Girl cauz’ that’s all they want to see. So I never set out to be popular or create a digital crutch on which to augment my sense of self-worth. Lucky really because yahoo divines that -1 people link to me! MSN suggest that I may be a little more popular reporting that 1 person links to me. Yay, that means that I have an average of 0. There was some poetry in having -1 links to me, 0 is, well, nothing. I wonder what you have to do to get an imaginary number of people linking to you.

I note that I am so unpopular that the immensity of my nothingness has broken the code at line 618. I bet that the code never had to calculate negative popularity or perhaps through some mathematical trick my popularity really is imaginary.

* I so wanted to write “…realised that he could have his cake and eating it too”, but I doubt that any but the most ardent Adams fans would get the reference.
** I also want a good excuse to invite myself to Grogblog and buy Darp a beer or three for his excelent contribution to the Benelong electorate and the internet in general.

1 comment:

babyoog said...

How do you get -1 links to you?

Actually, to further invalidate your post, I can tell you that in the web programming world, -1 is universal code for "Duh, I forgot how to count." Which could very well translate to "Um, I can't count that high." (The subject in this case being the web program that is calculating the number of links). So it seems you are MUCH more popular than you think!

My work here is done.