lily ponds

I might as well get into the game that Daily Koss, Maud Newton, Edward Champion, and most recently Andrew Sullivan started: here’s a link to a posting at another project of mine, DailyDickinson.com, that flooded my poor little Emily Dickinson blog with twice the traffic that this site ever sees and about a hundred times the traffic drawn by the Belle of Amherst. It’s not really much of a posting–just a response to a review in Scientific American that did a name-check of Miss Dickinson as a good example of morbid shyness that might today be medicated–but the magic of the internet and links from the tops in the blogosphere certainly drove the traffic.

Most of the people who visited during the course of the frenzy will not, of course, ever come back. Though DailyDickinson does have a small (as in “can be counted easily without taking off socks”) and international (U.S., U.K., Japan, and Korea show up often in the logs) readership, it’s sort of a niche market and not intended to be especially large. Each day there’s a Dickinson poem illustrated by a photograph, and when something Dickinsonian shows up in the news or appears on my Internet radar, there will be a comment or two. It was really an excuse to write a “Google gadget” to display an RSS feed in a tabbed interface–complete geekery.

Still, to be tapped by some of the big names on the ‘net (the Daily Koss link was actually a week earlier than the paroxetine post, as a resource for an ongoing series of “Literature for Kossacks”) is kind of a thrill; at the very least, it makes looking at the referrer logs more fun than usual.