How The Memoirs got 167000 hits in a few hours or a follow up post to Modern HDR photography

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This is a follow-up post to my previous post which was viewed over 127000 in the span of a few hours. This is part of a series of articles on HDR photography.

1. Modern HDR photography, a how-to
2. How The Memoirs got 167000 hits in few hours… <- You are here
3. The Memoirs got  viewed 170000 times in a day, an analysis
4. Understanding modern HDR Photography, a set of tools, links, examples and explanations

A quick update to mention that @ 19:36 PM, on Saturday the 15th of July 2006, I had over 152000 hits today.

…167000 hits @ 20:18 PM

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All the pictures from this post come from the HDR photo pool from flickr. Check them out, they have got some beautiful HDR photos available. As the title entails, this post examines how The Memoirs got over 127000 hits in a few hours without being dugg by digg. This post contains HDR images, you can see this as a photographical revue on recent HDR photos.

HDR exists to capture as many colors as possible, and works best with very high contrast pictures. The shutter speed is varied for a number of shots of the same subject then blended together with a software.

This is what Wikipedia has to say on High Dynamic Range imaging:

In computer graphics and cinematography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows.

This is the story how The Memoirs On A Rainy Day had more than 127000 visits in a day. The Memoirs became the #2 Growing blog on WordPress, #6 Top Blog on WordPress. The post itself made it to the #3 Top Post on WordPress, #6 top story on Reddit and #7 on del.icio.us. Every few minutes, I refresh the site and I am astounded by the interest that my little article has generated. I knew that for a fact that my traffic usually spiked during the weekends, but was in no way prepared for the astounding revelation that more than a 100000 people had visited my blog that day.

So this morning, as usual, I got up walked the dog. After that, I got my tea going and sat down in front of the computer. I checked the comments, responded to all of them, checked my regular reads and commented on them as well. I came back to my blog and found a question from a reader about a certain photograph that had used HDR to render some of its effects.

I started answering the reader and found some resources for him. I got into it, researching the topic, finding interesting images. Enough so, that I decided to make it into a full post. I included 3 source articles, reprinting and reformatting them, including credit where it was due. I also added my own comments as well as some nice photos from the HDR pool on flickr. Now I won’t get into the details of HDR photography, that has been covered amply in my post. You will see that in this post, HDR photos are used exclusively. If you feel that you would like to know more, please read my original post on this matter.

 

As usual, I always submit all my stories to NowPublic and Reddit. I had stopped submitting my posts to digg since I had received some comments that I did not deem worthy of response. Also, I discovered that because a reader pointed it out to me, that my URL was blocked from digg. I find that NowPublic and Reddit were a good place for these stories. In the beginning, I use to reprint them completely on Newsvine. I stopped doing this, because of the amount of time that it took.

I have also submitted some stories to some blog carnivals. Blog carnivals is where you submit your stories to certain categories with other blogs and these stories are then published, sent out to readers and publicized for a few days.

 

I have also been submitting a lot of comments. From Rocketboom, to ZeFrank, to Galcticast, Scobleizer and other top 100 Technorati blogs, I have made comments. A lot more than before. But this in itself does not guarantee any form of return of the scale I am talking about right now.

Actually, right now, since there have been some problems with the WordPress stats pages, I think that my counter is being overwhelmed by the amounts of visit that I receive. I will publish another post with details and screengrabs about the amount of traffic this one post has generated.

After I had finished this, I published it at around 11:29 AM. I started noticing something weird, when my normal traffic jumped through the roof in about half an hour. I looked at the incoming links an saw that there was a large portion coming through Reddit. I checked up on it and saw that my post was at #7 and climbing. I also say that over 30 people had already saved the link through del.icio.us.

 

By 15h00 PM today, I was nearing the 50000. When I started writing this article, I was hoping in generating 15000 total visits today, close to 1000 visits in one day. At last count, I have had over 114000 today.

How did this all start?

 

Simply by submitting a story that I had just posted in response to a reader to Reddit and things picked up from there. It was picked up by Popurls, it was saved onto del.icio.us, it was blogged a few times and commented on.

 

Why? It has to do with the viral nature of the blogosphere. Some bloggers aren’t even aware of this. Viral, means the way it was circulated from word to mouth. However, since the blogosphere is still mostly a written medium, stories are circulated from one blog onto another. When Robert Scoble left Microsoft, he got over 90000 hits in a day. Another example of this was when Amanda Congdon announced that she had left/ was fired from Rocketboom.

The news takes on a life of its own and uses the blogosphere, by way of the bloggers, to transmit itself very rapidly.

 

The main thing for The Memoirs is to get some nice exposure, and bring in new readers for my content and some sponsors. Riding the Long Tail of a digg or a Reddit is paramount to be able to monetize a blog in the long term.

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Previous: Modern HDR Photography, a how-to

Next: The Memoirs were viewed 170000 times, an analysis

 

 

 

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