Image is everything

Marisa is going to be my accomplice in an experiment here.

I am rather fascinated with Blogger's addition of the stats feature to its dashboard. I'm all for gaining any knowledge I can on who reads my stuff and why. I know I'm not making any money off this thing, but it's still interesting. While I mostly write this blog for myself, I do like to find topics that interest other people.

After taking a tour through the stats, I have determined that people who come to my blog are interested in three primary things:

1. Pictures of super expensive baseball cards.
2. Pictures of pretty girls.
3. Pictures of anything involving pop culture.

In other words, I could write the following:

sadfjaleruelaufald adflajfld aouou;'a'av tlajdlafjald alj aldj. eerogpipsis;kfs. eoudaljadlfjadl alau. zcoul caouohp loujssl. adoauf aoulj. ;ks;gispix;k;sk adpia;k;aeo ouad ewerouwoeu oozzuzuzz.

And if I put a picture of beautiful Marisa with it, it would draw some "readers."

There's the back of the Marisa Miller card. (Anybody else remember these swimsuit cards that SI put out a few years ago?)

That's all my readers care about, according to Blogger.

You don't know how happy that makes a guy who loves the written word.

But it's not surprising. I'm half-convinced that 80 percent of the people who hop on the internet are only there because Paris Hilton did something. The amount of wonderful information available online is mind-blowing, but it seems like nobody cares because ... ooooh, look "Wife Swap" is on!!!!

I do know that there are people who read the card blogs faithfully. It's difficult to measure those kinds of readers, except when people comment (that's why it's important to comment!). The blogger stats only measure page views, which could originate from anywhere. Viewers may be interested in cards, they may be interested in old TV shows, they may be interested in T&A. You can't control their interests. So going by page views to judge what intrigues your particular blog's readers probably isn't the best idea.

For example, the most popular blog posts that I have written within the last month include a post I wrote back in May of 2009. It was a Define the Design poll post to name the 1990 Topps set. I think I took 5 minutes to write it. But because there was a famed Lichtenstein painting of a cartoon girl, the post keeps getting hits every week, every day.

A post that I did mourning the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, back in June of 2009, also receives hits every day. Although I put my heart into that one, it likely still gets hits because I featured images of the two celebrities, along with a number of other celebrities. (I think the internet would implode if there were no celebrities).

But it's not just girls and famous people. This post gets a lot of hits because there are images of famous, expensive baseball cards.

The two recent posts that I did on the 1955 Jackie Robinson and the 1957 Dodgers Sluggers cards are still going strong in terms of page views, even weeks after I wrote them.

In fact, the most recent Cardboard Appreciation post that I did, featuring the '78 rookie card of Paul Molitor and Alan Trammell, immediately shot to the top of the most viewed posts for the week -- by far. I didn't think it was all that exciting of a post, but it didn't matter, because it featured a picture of a famed card.

Fortunately, some posts do not fall into the above categories. The original dollar-store post from a year-and-a-half ago remains super popular. I'm not sure why. There are no mojo cards in it. Maybe because the title is "dollar-store find" and it draws bargain hunters from across the U.S.?

The "best glasses in the history of baseball cards" draws a bunch of viewers many months after I wrote it. Dudes who wear glasses and play baseball are always popular. Which reminds me, I need to do another one of those posts soon.

And there are a number of other posts that seem to be read only because of what was written there. That is always too cool. And I'm grateful.

In fact, I hope you don't think I'm taking this too seriously. Only a small part of me cares about what the general public reads here. But most of what I care about on this blog is that I'm interested in what I write, and that the people who truly care about cards are interested in what I write. That's all.

As for the rest of you, come here to see pretty pictures or come here to read semi-coherent thoughts. Whatever you like.

But while I've got those non-faithful readers' attention with Ms. Miller up top, how about if I set a personal record for page views with this post?

Alert the Guinness people:

OK, Blogger start calculating.

Marisa, our work here is done.