The difference a day makes

Tomorrow is the deadline for poster session submissions for ACRL's 13th National conference in Baltimore, March 29 - April 1, 2007. I had submitted a group session and been turned down earlier this fall. We, everyone who did not have proposals accepted, were advised to resubmit our proposals as poster sessions. The two other librarians who were going to present opted out and I was waffling about presenting the topic alone. I had pretty much decided to do a poster session submission on blogs, but was not sure I wanted - or should - submit two proposals. My goal for today was to make a decision and submit. I did, it's done, and I'm good. They were not brilliant. But as with the ALA poster session, I will not embarrass myself if accepted (fingers crossed).

I wanted to include the collaborative blog project as a part of one poster submission, so I emailed my colleague and ask if she minded. All is well with that and she was very positive looking at is as an opportunity to drum up more blog traffic. And, because blog traffic, aka statistics, are part of the presentation as well I took a quick look at my StatCounter accounts this afternoon at work. Holy cow! What a difference a day made on our traffic. The blog had been averaging a dozen or so hits a day, not much for viewer ship, but we are new, no one specifically important, and just starting. Imagine my surprise seeing 59 hits for yesterday and 48 so far today. I had added two short posts on Tuesday, one on a Chronicle of Higher Education article, the other on a cool little search engine called Ms. Dewey that I'd read about on another blog. Neither post all that exciting or even controversial. Plus, there were no comments.

I looked at the "recent came from activity" on my account because it shows came from and landing page statistics. Sure enough, with the exception of six hits, each of the 107 results came from the Technorati Tag on the Ms Dewey search engine post and landed on the post itself. Odder still was the breadth of countries from which the queries were sent; in no particular order, from Maine to California in the U.S., plus England, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Korea, South Africa, Netherlands, Bahrain, Australia, Italy, France, and Israel.

Out of morbid curiosity, I'm adding Ms Dewey to this post and it's corresponding tags.

Tags: ACRL, ACRL National Conference, ACRL poster session, Academic library blog, StatCounter, Ms. Dewey, Ms. Dewey Search Engine, Library Humor