By Popular Request

For years I have been sending a regular selection of my favorite quotes to friends and contacts all over the world. I try my best to send a quote every day, but inspite of my best intentions, I end up skipping a day or two from time to time. It doesn't take much time, usually only a few minutes. I have a broad selection of bookmarked internet websites to draw from, plus the three to five books I'm in the process of reading at any particular point in time.

Recently I decided to start keeping track of the quotes that I had sent, so I created a quote weblog (http://isobe.typepad.com/quotes) and setup my email alias so that it automatically posts each quote to the site when I send them out. It seemed like the path of least resistance at the time, and works well. I setup the weblog so that it was open to the public, but didn't do anything to promote it. I wasn't really looking to drive traffic to it since it was mainly just a log, a way of organizing and remembering what I sent to the quote alias.

Since I didn't block access the big search engines on the internet - Google, Yahoo, MSN - eventually sent their webspiders over to have a look, and I started to get a few hits a day from people looking for quotes. Then suddenly, about a week or so ago, the hits on the site really took off. The daily number of hits doubled, then doubled again, then doubled again...

So, what happened? It turns out that I'm a big Dr. Seuss fan. I've always loved his books, and even have a copy of his first movie - "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" which was filmed long before Jim Carrey was even born. So, it was very natural for me to have a quote from the good Dr. in my quote collection. Then when the latest Dr. Seuss movie - "The Cat in the Hat" hit the screens apparently lots of people went to their keyboards and searched the internet for his quotes....