1. Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting” (1 March) I daresay that for many visitors this piece wasn’t what they were really looking for. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting Twitter case study. For some value of “interesting”.
2. So what is Stilgherrian, exactly? (12 April) Almost as popular as the official About Stilgherrian, which isn’t listed here because technically it’s not a “post”.
3. Virgin Blue’s mistake reveals countless selfish whingers (15 November) A combination of a good headline and being listed at mUmBRELLA helps boost traffic.
4. Live Blog: Politics & Technology Forum 2009 (22 February) Again, proof that a slow, steady audience over time can be of great value.
5. Jim Wallace’s pro-censorship lies and distortions (26 January) Wallace speaks for the Australian Christian Lobby about Internet censorship, using the “extreme libertarian” straw man and other fallacious debating tricks.
6. Special Melon Pepperoni Edition now online! (28 March) It’s probably less that this post is about an edition of Stilgherrian Live, more that it includes Andrew Bolt’s astoundingly tasteless slur on those who oppose Internet censorship.
7. What now for Senator Conroy and the Magic Filter? (30 March) Again, not what I’d have picked from my many writings about Internet censorship, but there you go.
8. Conversations are not markets, people! (26 July) A long ranty piece that seems to have struck a chord.
9. Project TOTO: the #secretmission has begun! (19 May) Interesting that the post announcing this project was the most popular, and then interest declined. Why? My guess is that visits to this post were inflated by so many people commenting on The Gnome Incident rather than the substance of the project. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
10. Live Blog: ALIA Information Online 2009, Day 1 (20 January) This is a big surprise. However we’ve now moved well out of the long head of very popular content and all sorts of factors could come into play. I suspect that traffic to this page was a short, sharp spike around the time of the conference and then virtually nothing since.

Many older posts also continued to be popular.

Indeed, 5 of the top 10 posts of all time are not from this year, and it took longer to work down the list to find a Top 10 for 2009 than it did to find the Top 10 of all time — yet more proof that the more material you have on your website the more visits you’ll get. Don’t delete your old material, people!

This could also explain why the Top 10 above is mostly from the first half of the year.

OK, the Top 10 posts of 2009 that weren’t written in 2009.

1. So this is human sexuality? July (2008) Little more that a collection of the popular words from sex-related spam, it continues to attract 2000-odd visits a month.
2. Julie, I want to make you a star (in a Samantha Fox kind of way) (September 2007) My ode to Julie Bishop, popular because of its photograph of Samantha Fox.
3. Live Blog: Internet censorship forum (November 2008) Can anyone tell me why this post is the most popular of the many I wrote about Internet censorship prior to this year?
4. Hello Kitty, you’re dead, and other surprise products (October 2007) People link to the (fake) photo of the Hello Kitty AK-47. Few seem to realise it’s a joke.
5. Film Review: “Joy Division” (February 2008) I think most people link here for the classic photo of Joy Division by Kevin Cummins.
6. Heath Ledger dead: jokes here please (January 2008) My tasteless experiment in Googlebaiting continues to attract visitors.
7. More Steve Irwin jokes (September 2006) Another lesson: Providing a forum for the lowest common denominator of society generates hits — but are they of lasting value?
8. The Madness of Corey Worthington Delaney (January 2008) And speaking of lowest common denominator…
9. What’s wrong with used knickers? (December 2007) Well, it’s a fair question, isn’t it?
10. Used knickers, revisited (January 2008) I detect a theme developing here. Thank goodness we’ve reached #10.

You might also like to check out my own selection for what I think was best, plus the lists for previous years:

• Most popular posts of 2008
• Most popular posts of 2007

1. Heath Ledger dead: jokes here please. It’s rather depressing to discover that my tasteless little experiment was this year’s highlight. Maybe I should’ve put advertising on this page.
2. So this is human sexuality?
3. How do you treat your staff? Like 37signals, or like this prick?
4. Topic 9 to discuss Australia 2020 Summit’s government topic. This is actually spurious, as most hits are from link-following robots attempting to spam my blog at topic9.com.au (which has been since been abandoned).
5. 67 Australian SAS captured airbase defended by 1000, though most of this traffic is to see the photo. The miltech fanboys are incapable of hosting their own photos, it seems, because most of their troll-filled forums don’t allow people to upload photos. Dark Ages.
6. About Stilgherrian, which would seem to be a popular second page for people to visit once they’ve arrived here for other reasons.
7. Corey Delaney, freedom fighter (for the right to party) — and increasingly I think Mr Corey Worthington Delaney is one of the true heroes of 2008. But not thereafter.
8. Spaceport America, designed by Foster+Partners.
9. Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up.
10. Achtung! Die grosskapitalistischen Hühner kommen!

As with last year’s list, I’m somewhat disappointed with the results. I’ll therefore choose my own selection of “best” posts, just like I did last year.

And the results for all posts over time, not just those published in 2008?

1. Julie, I want to make you a star (in a Samantha Fox kind of way). Most of this traffic is to see the “revealing” photo of Samantha Fox. This page is also still currently the number one Google search result for “neocon sex kitten”. Thank you, Julie Bishop!
2. Heath Ledger dead: jokes here please.
3. So this is human sexuality?
4. How do you treat your staff? Like 37signals, or like this prick?
5. Topic 9 to discuss Australia 2020 Summit’s government topic.
6. 67 Australian SAS captured airbase defended by 1000.
7. Hello Kitty, you’re dead, and other surprise products, another “let’s hotlink to the photo” spurious result.
8. About Stilgherrian.
9. More Steve Irwin jokes, which was our Number One last year.
10. Corey Delaney, freedom fighter (for the right to party)

The most common search terms apart from my own name are still “heath ledger jokes”, “steve irwin jokes”, “used knickers” and “corey delaney”. The only ones I could see “young pussy”, “asian pussy”, “strip pork gams porn”, “sex fuck cartoon milf jimmy neutron”, “latina asian hardcore free no charge gratis porn sex amateur” and, my favourite, “deep throat black hung transsexuals no membership free access”.

[Update: Actually, there is an increase in traffic. It's not showing up in the search analysis, but that page of search terms is getting 200 visitors a day.]

But let’s look at the total traffic anyway, this time using a graph from Google Analytics which shows visits only visitors to the jokes page.

As of just now, there’s been 11,717 page views in total, representing 8,798 unique visitors who stayed on average for 3 mins 44 secs per visit — quite respectable!

Traffic took a couple of days to peak — the first day being fuelled by Google Adwords — with a secondary peak the following week when Ledger’s funeral arrangements hit the news. Google rates the peaks as about 1000 visits a day and even now, a month later, we’re still seeing 60 to 80 visits a day.

As for the jokes themselves, well… to be honest I really don’t want to read them again. Most of them were crap. If you’ve got any astounding sociological observations, feel free to post a comment.

If you read my every word — and I know you do, Gentle Reader — you’ll remember that my compulsory 9/11 post from 2006 mentioned “recreational grief”, a term I picked up from Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying:

The degree of public mourning following the deaths of Lady Diana and John F Kennedy Jr led social observers to wonder if grief is an ever-present latent feeling just waiting to be exploited by the political elite, if people’s lives are so empty that they engage in recreational grief… Perhaps individuals are emotive puppets manipulated by the mass media and/or political elite, and people cry because they are shown other people crying for a celebrity.

Perhaps outrage is also an ever-present latent feeling. If people’s lives are so comfortable that there’s nothing serious to get angry about, they’ll find somewhere to vent their outrage — going to considerable effort to find it.

Yesterday’s incidents could well illustrate this.

Gavin decided to call me an “asshole” for running the Heath Ledger jokes page.

Did any of you brain dead assholes stop to think Heath’s family have access to the world wide web, and could read this shit?
I hope that when you pass on, some asshole posts jokes about you!
But then again, that ain’t gonna happen…….
…….Because your not rich, famous or good looking, hey?

To which I replied:

You’re right. I’ve never realised it before. The Internet might be read by someone! We’d better not put anything there which could possibly upset any of the 1+ billion Internet users. When you get a moment, could you drop me a quick list of everything that has the potential to be upsetting? I’ll make sure that it’s never mentioned again.

I emailed Gavin privately, asking him if he’d answer, non-abusively, the question I’d actually posed on that page: If you’re going to whinge that “It’s too soon to make jokes,” then at least suggest how long someone has to be dead before they’re not sacred any more.

His even more abusive answer, which I didn’t publish, contains the most delicious irony:

I was talking about respect asshole, something which obviously you don’t have, and never will.

Respect. Asshole. That’s a keeper.

What’s interesting is that Gavin was searching for the name of the music a TV station played under their report of Ledger’s death. He saw Google’s link to Heath Ledger jokes — but that delivered him to the Arts category index. He had to click again on “Looking for the Heath Ledger death jokes? Try here.” He presumably read some jokes to generate some outrage, and then scrolled all the way past 160-odd comments to the form where he could finally express his outrage.

That’s quite an effort.

And yet he didn’t bother exploring any other page on the site before doing that. He had no idea of the context in which he was calling people “brain dead assholes”. He only read About Stilgherrian after he’d posted his second piece of abuse.

Similarly, carra was searching the blogosphere for “anthony callea” and found our current poll, Who’s the ultimate pop princess? Not finding any information to fuel what I assume is a fan’s appetite for news — and maybe upset that I described Callea as “fading fast”, certainly an accurate description of his music sales — he or she posted an insult.

The only amusing thing about this is that 10 people have wasted their time visiting your pathetic blog with an F grade attempt at humour.

After looking at just one post out of 900+ carra’s considered judgement is “pathetic”. I am, of course, shattered.

At least carra took the time to vote for Kylie Minogue before venting.

So, is there “latent outrage” in all of us, waiting to express itself recreationally? Or am I way off the mark?

Well unless Heath Ledger is in the news again for some reason, apart from the routine news about his funeral etc, I think the steady decline seen in the traffic over the last three days will continue.

As with the Steve Irwin jokes, though, the traffic will never fade away completely. There’ll always be some level of searching for “heath ledger jokes”, and occasional surges as he enters the news.

There’s today’s graph for now. More detailed analysis and reflection later.

Given that there’s quite a bit of fluctuation in web traffic from day to day anyway — for all manner of reasons — I’m going to say that it’s been relatively steady through the week so far.

As I mentioned yesterday, the Heath Ledger jokes page is now sustaining itself on Google search results. I think I’ll do a more detailed end-of week analysis tomorrow. I just wanted to publish something about this Experiment today because I know every single reader is awaiting my every word on this important global issue.

Another day, another traffic graph for The Heath Ledger Experiment. And once more, contrary to my expectations, there’s another gentle increase in traffic.

Could this be because the Heath Ledger jokes page is now the top result when you do a Google search for “heath ledger jokes”?

Today is about other things for me, not Mr Ledger, so I’ll return to these thoughts tomorrow. But do feel free to add your own comments.

Yesterday I reported that traffic for The Heath Ledger Experiment had declined across the weekend. Today I can tell you that the decline has been reversed and we’re slightly up again. Across 6 days, we’ve seen a total of 6,407 unique human visitors to the jokes page.

I have no real explanation for this yet, and it may just be statistical noise. Still, my gut feeling is that we’re moving past the initial feeding-frenzy. Perhaps the early visitors are people who actively seek out a forum for this sort of thing, because that’s how they gain the attention they seek. Later, others stumble across the site once those early visitors have seeded it with content.

One old friend, who I hadn’t heard from in years, emailed me across the weekend to say:

I stumbled across your site after someone sent me a Heath Ledger joke and I couldn’t think of a witty comeback, so decided to resort to a websearch and let the internet do my thinking for me. I never did find one good enough to send, but I did enjoy a productive half hour rooting around in your website.

I’m also starting to see inbound links from forums where people are discussing whether what I’m doing is tasteless or not, or reflecting on the way we feed on celebrity news in general. Is this perhaps the natural cycle of such things?

What I have learned is that it’s very easy to generate a few thousand inbound visitors. But why you’d want to do that, and what you do with those visitors, are completely different questions.

More soon…

That compares with 33 related to Corey Worthington Delaney and 2 to Steve Irwin.

In total there are 1773 different search phrases so far this month. Here’s the full Top 100.

search phrase	views	% of searches
heath ledger jokes	2286	30.8 %
corey delaney	544	7.3 %
heath ledger dead jokes	335	4.5 %
heath ledger joke	219	2.9 %
heath ledger	175	2.3 %
heath ledger death jokes	142	1.9 %
jokes about heath ledger	140	1.8 %
steve irwin jokes	98	1.3 %
stilgherrian	98	1.3 %
corey worthington delaney	94	1.2 %
corey delaney naked	79	1 %
corey delaney child porn	55	0.7 %
heath ledger dead joke	55	0.7 %
www.vodaphone.com.au	45	0.6 %
ledger jokes	34	0.4 %
heath leger jokes	28	0.3 %
corey worthington	28	0.3 %
corey delaney myspace	28	0.3 %
personal	23	0.3 %
vodaphone.com.au	22	0.2 %
corey delaney pornography	22	0.2 %
jokes heath ledger	22	0.2 %
corey worthington child porn	21	0.2 %
heath ledger jokes death	19	0.2 %
dead heath ledger jokes	18	0.2 %
corey delaney t-shirts	18	0.2 %
corey delaney child pornography	17	0.2 %
heath ledger jokes dead	16	0.2 %
used knickers	16	0.2 %
jokes about the death of heath ledger	16	0.2 %
corey delaney quotes	15	0.2 %
business	15	0.2 %
heath ledger tasteless jokes	13	0.1 %
corey delaney worthington	13	0.1 %
child porn	12	0.1 %
corey delaney porn	12	0.1 %
tasteless heath ledger jokes	12	0.1 %
corey delaney website	12	0.1 %
corey worthington porn	12	0.1 %
corey delaney shirt	11	0.1 %
corey worthington child pornography	10	0.1 %
corey delaney party	10	0.1 %
heath ledger death joke	10	0.1 %
jokes about heath ledger s death	10	0.1 %
howard	10	0.1 %
heath ledger joke dead	10	0.1 %
heath ledger is dead jokes	10	0.1 %
steve irwin joke	9	0.1 %
cory delaney	9	0.1 %
drug overdose jokes	9	0.1 %
heath ledger and jokes	9	0.1 %
false	9	0.1 %
jokes on heath ledger	9	0.1 %
heather ledger	8	0.1 %
paul neil milne johnstone	8	0.1 %
corey delaney jokes	8	0.1 %
corey worthington shirts	8	0.1 %
stilgherrian.com	8	0.1 %
corey delaney shirts	7	0 %
enmore	7	0 %
corey worthington naked	7	0 %
daylight	7	0 %
supernaut	7	0 %
corey delaney video	7	0 %
space	7	0 %
samanta fox	7	0 %
corey delaney photo	7	0 %
leila mckinnon corey	6	0 %
corey delaney cartoon	6	0 %
heather ledger jokes	6	0 %
natasha	6	0 %
fruit carving	6	0 %
corey worthington arrested	6	0 %
corey t shirts	6	0 %
sam connell	6	0 %
steve	6	0 %
flickr	6	0 %
steve irwin death jokes	6	0 %
corey t-shirts	6	0 %
lolcat	6	0 %
bernadette mcmenamin	6	0 %
thai brothel	6	0 %
heath ledger jokes tasteless	6	0 %
ledger joke	6	0 %
samantha fox	6	0 %
gay navy sex	6	0 %
heather ledge	6	0 %
www.vodaphone.com	5	0 %
stilgherrian.com/personal/prussia_net_vs_skank_media/ new prussia	5	0 %
heath ledger overdose jokes	5	0 %

Some of other entries in the list are a worry…

Traffic related to The Heath Ledger Experiment continues to decline across the long weekend, the exact opposite of my admittedly ill-informed speculation. From a peak of 1,970 unique human visitors daily, it’s dropped to 1,227.

However that’s still well above the typical figure of around 500 unique humans daily which prevailed before this Experiment and The Madness of Corey Worthington Delaney.

Searches for Ledger-related terms now dominate the search-generated traffic to the website. Here’s the current Top 10 search terms which brought visitors here.

search phrase	views	% of searches
heath ledger jokes	2286	30.8%
corey delaney	544	7.3%
heath ledger dead jokes	335	4.5%
heath ledger joke	219	2.9%
heath ledger	175	2.3%
heath ledger death jokes	142	1.9%
jokes about heath ledger	140	1.8%
steve irwin jokes	98	1.3%
stilgherrian	98	1.3%
corey worthington delaney	94	1.2%
other phrases	3289	44.3%

Bear in mind, this is a report for the entire calendar month, and we only started this experiment on 23 January. If we’re looking at current traffic, Heath Ledger is clearly what people are looking for.

I’ll continue poking at the numbers… more soon!

Hmmm… I predicted yesterday that traffic would increase again across the weekend, but it hasn’t so far. Saturday’s traffic was actually the lowest of the four days since I started The Heath Ledger Experiment.

No theories yet. Let’s look again tomorrow and see what happens with the Sunday traffic (which will include hits from Saturday in the US, thanks to the Earth being round). A sunny Sunday isn’t right for numerical analysis.

As before, the figure for the last day only includes traffic from midnight to about 4am. And the number in the top-left corner of the graph isn’t relevant, as it’s “hits” — which includes all the pieces on a page as well as the page itself.

Two things this morning. One, a look back at how much time this has taken so far, in response to a less-than-polite comment from Todd and a sensible question from Crispin. Two, some speculation about how the traffic might go from here.

The Heath Ledger Experiment is generating tons of interesting data for very little investment in time or money.

Once I’d heard via Twitter that Ledger was dead, the idea congealed in my mind while running an errand to the shops. After that, Day One went something like this:

task	time
Write web page	5 mins
Source & prep photo	5 mins
Figure out Google AdWords	30 mins
Run initial AdWords campaign	30 mins
Deal with 1st batch of comments	15 mins
Run second AdWords campaign	30 mins
Deal with 2nd batch of comments	15 mins

The set-up was incredibly fast because, well, it’s just a matter of writing words and pressing “Publish”. Google’s indexing robots hit my RSS feed hourly or so, so it’s not long before I’m indexed.

The most time-consuming part was setting up a Google AdWords account and figuring out how it all worked. Now that I know, next time will be quicker.

That table says it took 2+ hours, but that time was scattered across the working day. I was concentrating on other things, but came back to poke The Experiment — 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. With a “real” campaign I’d set it up, let it run for a day, and then come back and analyse it.

You can probably add in another 2 hours’ worth of me talking at people and saying “Wow! This is so cool!” about 374 times.

I’ve probably spent 2 hours a day since then poring over the numbers and writing up the analysis. Again, in a “real” campaign I’d have a much more focussed process for evaluating the campaign’s effectiveness — and of course acting on the results. As I’ve said before, my sole aim here was to see how it works, not to specifically generate traffic or produce sales leads.

The potential research papers here, if that’s not too grand a description, are:

1. Lessons for small businesses wanting to try this for themselves.
2. How the rise in traffic to the jokes page unfolded, compared with when the story was covered in the media.
3. How the price of the search terms changed over time.
4. A linguistic analysis of the jokes and comments themselves.

“Research notes”, really. Any preferences for what you’d like to see first?

Now, the future.

I suspect that Friday’s drop in traffic was a weekly cycle thing, and that traffic will increase again across the weekend.

• Traffic was down on Friday generally across some other high-traffic sites we host.
• The younger people who are more likely to look for these jokes will have more time on their hands — both for word-of-mouth referrals and looking for amusements. This is especially true in Australia, where it’s a long weekend for Australia Day.

Any predictions from the floor?