Playin' Detective

It's Friday morning and I can't wipe the grin off my face. Well, it is Friday, and Friday of a three-day workweek for me, but that's not the source of the smile. Not all of it anyway.

No. My sunrise arrival at work was greeted with an email bearing good news: one of the projects I worked on last year won an industry award last night! Happy clients, happy corporate leadership, very happy me. Smiles all around.

I'm hoping this means that my Silver Surfer dude (that's him in the picture) will soon have a little bronze guy to keep him company ... we'll see.

Another email made me smile, too, because it told me that maybe, just maybe, I'm onto something. And clearly, that I'm not as stupid as Blogger might lead me to believe.

You may, or may not, remember that I wrote about Next Blog back in February. It's a Blogger navbar function that supposedly takes you to a blog of "similar content" when you click on it. Whatever.

For me, it's meant new readership from all over the world. But I noticed a funny thing a little more than a week ago: the Next Blog visits stopped. Entirely. Not slowed down or decreased ... completely stopped. This went on for three or four days.

At that point, I got on the Blogger help forum, did a lot of searching and when I didn't find an answer, I queried this. I got a response. It amounted to a lengthy tutorial in how to drive readership to your blog. Send your URL to your friends and family ... update your blog with interesting content. Get other bloggers to include the URL to your site.

Huh? This had nothing at all to do with the question I'd asked. See, I'd wondered if the Chinese spammer from a few weeks ago -- and my subsequent addition of comment moderation -- might have something to do with pulling me out of the Next Blog rotation. No one answered that question. So I just said the hell with it and dropped it.

I'm still monitoring closely though as I continue to clear the spam comments from the blog (I think I'm a little more than halfway there now) and I am now getting an occasional Next Blog visit. I'm maybe getting 2 or 3 a day -- compared to the 30, 40, even 50 or more I was getting early last week and HAD BEEN since February!

Then, I got an email from Rachel at Apron Strings who had seen my help forum query. She, too, had noticed a drop-off in her Next Blog visits that started last week, too! Hmmmm ... An email exchange later, the one I got from her this morning, I find out that she TOO had been hit by the Chinese spammer and resorted to comment moderation. So, I'm now wondering ...

Has anyone else -- whether you've been Chinese-spammed or not -- noticed a drop-off in Next Blog visits since last Wednesday/Thursday? Please leave me a comment if so, noting whether or not you have been spammed and/or added comment moderation in the past month or two. If enough of us are having this problem, MAYBE we can get an intelligent answer ... and maybe even a resolution. Thanks!