O’DonnellWeb

On Monday Techcruch posted an article about a new equine search engine. I tried to comment on the post, but my comment vanished into thin air. That seems to be happening a lot lately. I suspect my current IP address must be on the spam list for some anti-spam tool. However, that is not the point of this post.

Failing to make my point via comment, I posted it at Horseshues, which immediately created a trackback on the Techcrunch post. The trackback was prominently displayed just after the post and before the comments. Given that Techcruch is the #11 most popular blog, with millions of readers every day, how many visits to Horseshues would you expect the trackback to produce?

I didn’t have any expectation, and I didn’t do it to create traffic. However, I was curious this morning, so I checked. The trackback link produced 7 visits, and one of them was probably me!

The equine post produced far fewer comments that the average post at Techcruch, so it probably was not read as often as the average post. But still, I’ve got to believe thousands of people read the post and the comments, but only 6 cared enough to see what another horse related site had to say about the same issue. I have no idea what that means, other than maybe Techcruch readers are not horse people. He posted the story not as a horse story, but as an interesting example of a search engine targeted to a narrow vertical. The point I was making was that it is not a good example though as functionally, the site simply does not work well.

If I care enough about a story to read the comments, I almost always click through the trackbacks. Either I’m odd, or I’m way overestimating how many people actually read the original story on Techcrunch.