I posted it at 1am on Christmas night (well boxing day), and woke up to dozens of comments in the moderation queue. I thought people would have switched off to celebrate Christmas but clearly not because over two days alone I received 4000+ unique visitors, of which about 40% were from Techmeme (Hackernews narrowly beat Techmeme). It dropped off later on, but it was picked up by other sources, which shows an indirect influence of Techmeme.

I was about half way down the page, but I stayed up there for about a day. http://www.techmeme.com/081225/h1850

I guess it’s a particular audience. What though, I have no idea!

I invite others to share their experiences and will certainly monitor this closely.

Yes, I did make an assumption about my audience and the focus of metarand is as you describe it – I could’ve explicitly pointed this out, but decided not to let it be implied from the context.

It was for my Phishing Fools about OAuth and phishing behaviour patterns. My post was the lead ‘discussion’ article on Techmeme (as in the first linked under the article ‘defining’ that segment of Techmeme news).

This is isolated data, and I’m sure it’s not representative, but here’s why I find it interesting. That article was also linked by Jeremy Keith on his blog, Adactio, and by Marshall Kirkpatrick in a ReadWriteWeb article.

I got 1 visitor from Techmeme, 37 from RWW and 300-odd from Adactio.

That has to be about audience relevancy.

Ryan Spoon failed to point out the importance of what audience you want, and you’ve done the same. You mention ‘highly engaged and relevant readers’ in your post above. That’s only true of Techmeme if your blog is focused on the meta-discussion around startups and Silicon Valley. Yours is, pretty much, so it probably works for you?

(although I note that this post is not listed under the discussion for Ryan Spoon’s post – no other posts there either)

Or do you just expect that anybody reading this would have the same objective for their blog as you do? Am I the lone exception in your readers?