October 25, 2004 Archives

As I walked downstairs this morning I told Helaine I had seen a squirrel standing on our front steps next to a pumpkin she had put out. The pumpkin was bought to be carved, though it hasn't been yet.

It's not unusual to see squirrels, especially this time of year. Normally, they're moving around, gathering acorns. This year acorns are in short supply.

A few minutes later, Helaine called to me. "You've got to see this!" On the step, the squirrel was eating the pumpkin. He had gnawed in and there was now a hole large enough to stick his face in.

Another squirrel came by and the two fought. It seemed this pumpkin, larger than both of them combined and with plenty of room for more holes, should have been enough. Squirrels must be territorial.

We get pumpkins and sit them out on our front step every year. Usually, I carve them for Halloween. You would think a carved pumpkin with its smell more easily carried on the wind would be a more compelling attraction, but we've never seen anything like this before.

Attracting more squirrels is bad. This pumpkin will have to go and I suppose we'll have to rethink the whole pumpkin thing next year.

Early Sunday morning, literally a few minutes after it happened, I posted an entry about Ashlee Simpson's lip syncing incident on Saturday Night Live. (It's two entries below this one - or just click here). Because of the time it happened, after midnight Eastern time, it got very little 'conventional' news coverage until Sunday evening.

In the meantime, Google was busy indexing the Internet... including this site. All of a sudden, geofffox.com was listed up near the top when people searched to find out what had happened.

Because of this one event, this has been a very unusual day on this website. Of all my October 2004 traffic, half has come today! In fact, I have delivered nearly twenty times my normal number of pages, and the day's not over yet.

So, what have I learned from this? Certainly the power of Google. I always knew it drove Internet traffic, but never to the extent I see today. And I didn't even write my page to be optimized for Google. There are ways it could have been presented which would have gotten me more search hits.

It's also obvious that many of the entertainment sites people depend on are really Monday through Friday affairs with minimal or no weekend staffing. Yesterday, once I realized the traffic had begun, I looked at all the conventional entertainment news sites and found virtually nothing on this story. I haven't looked tonight, but I'll bet Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and the others led with Ashlee's problem.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the story of her scheduled 'live' performance tonight is reported. I'm guessing this one will get online a lot sooner, and by sites that have more 'schlep' than I have.

If you are here for the Ashlee story, thanks for coming by. Take a look around. Squeeze the produce. Post a comment. Come again any time. I'm thrilled you're here.