Storm Chat Yields 24,000 Page Views. Who Knew?

04/10/2023

So your agent got all carried away last Wednesday.

The old reporter instincts kicked in when the ice-storm struck (and no this ice storm wasn’t as bad as the one in 1998. I covered 24 straight days of it for the Citizen so your agent has a bit of a feel for it).

So the posts started flying on The Bulldog and some rather pesky feeds were put on a page to keep people up with the play-by-play.

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And then your agent said to himself: “Self, we could hold a chatroom on this puppy. It’s news and it’s happening to most everyone in the city so it could be a fruitful discussion.”

Then as I put posted the chatroom code and post after much screwing around with technology, I said to myself: “Self, this isn’t the stupidest thing you’ve ever done but it is on the list.”

Here’s why.

Lot’s of people didn’t have power so would have trouble communicating. It was the afternoon which is often a deadzone for readership on The Bulldog. People had better things to do than read this website in a bit of mini-crisis. The online chat wasn’t promoted so nobody knew it was coming.

“Oh no, what hath I done.” This is mucho worko for next to nothing.

Except it wasn’t.

The Bulldog Commenting All-Stars and a large number of first-time contributors pummeled the website with good comments and information. People were reporting power outages from their phones and trees falling and all the occurences that go with a big, damaging storm (or as Happy Town News likes to call it, a weather event).

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So when the weather event was over (and almost immediately when power went out in Bulldog World Headquarters), get this, 23,876 page views were recorded. That’s not a bad day for much bigger websites than the humble Bulldog, so there was much surprise in these quarters.

What can I say: It’s not me but the readers who keep this site going. And many thanks for your surprising great participation.

You can read the discussion by clicking here.

Ken Gray

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