One of my favorite things about having a blog is looking at the visitor stats, particularly the referring pages.

Most of them are from my friends’ blogs, other pages in this blog, or blogs where I’ve left comments. I also got a bunch of hits from being quoted in the EFF blog-a-thon blog.

The most interesting ones are those from search engines.

I can click on the link and see what the search was, the other results were, and how far buried in the results pages I landed.

MOST of those are people searching for a book on which I’ve commented. For example, just after the release of the last Harry Potter book, lots of people looked for it in conjunction with the word "slut" — which I actually didn’t remember being used in the book, but it was and lots of people were upset about it. They found me because I’d also read and commented on "Confessions of a Recovering Slut."

The most common single search term is "liza" — and I usually turn up on the 6th or 11th or some ridiculous page of Liza Minnelli results. Another oddly common one is Google searches for Pat Skarda, a Smith College professor whose reading list I reproduced after seeing her speak at a Smith Club of Atlanta event a few months ago. Pat is very interesting — I wish I’d take classes with her when I was still at Smith. I might not have quit being an English major.

The most peculiar one of late was a Yahoo search for "pimping out my slut wife" — another result I think I can thank Hollis Gillespie for helping produce. I would have guessed that this post was the first time I used the word "pimping" but I must be wrong about that. And NOW I’ll get even more hits from frustrated seekers of porn.

I’m off for a long weekend in Milwaukee, followed by a short conference in Chicago. So I may not be updating as often as usual. But I’ll be back on Thursday at the latest.