The Name of This Blogging Game is 'Self-referential'

I surrender.

While perusing my states at Site Meter, I discovered that two of my visitors had clicked onto Joystory via www.msnbc.msn.com. I blinked three times but it still read the same. I thought: What??? I mean, I have this fantasy/hope/delusion that someone from an established media might someday discover Joystory and find something here worth linking back to, or responding to via comments or email or--and this is the most over the top fantasy/hope/dellusion of all--discover my awesome [;)] writing talent and point me toward a paying gig in which I can support my habit with my habit. My 'habit' being reading, writing and thinking. But I am not yet deluded enough to think that less than one month's worth of amateurish promoting could have brought me anywhere near such a dream come true. So since Site Meter offers active links to the referrer pages, I was able to click over to the page where some one (two some ones) had clicked over to me. And this is what I found:

Blog Talk
Conversations in the blogosphere about Anna Quindlen

This title headed what appears to be a live feed of a Technorati Watch List which monitors all blogs mentioning the target 'Anna Quindlen' who just happens to be a columnist on Newsweek. It seems they have done this same thing for each of the Newsweek columnists.

Anyway. This was the link to Joystory which I found there:

Summer Reading
... for Nicholas by James Patterson How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen The Sound and the Fury by William ...
Posted 3 days ago in Joystory 2 links

And I just had to laugh. For of all my posts this one was the least likely to showcase my 'awesome [;)] writing talent' for it is nothing but a list of some of the books I have read this summer. I posted it when I was desperate for a post but too cross-eyed and brain-fried with fatigue to compose anything of substance. And yet this throw away post has generated more search-engine referrers than any of my other posts. And is one of the few that has generated both comments and emails. Go figure.

Maybe I should blog the entire list of 100 books that I finished in 2004.

And, yes, I completely planned this post as an attempt to reproduce the effect. It's at least as effective at promotion as hours and hours of bleary-eyed browsing on Blog Explosion. And self-referential seems to be the name of this Blogging Game. If I can't shake the feeling that calling attention to myself is unseemly if not downright sinful, I might as well get out of this game.

Update: Sorry Anna for misspelling your name in the first attempt. I'm so embarrassed. So much for that awesome writing talent.