The XKCD data died in a blogging accident
Tim Finin, 1:49pm 13 January 2008
The popular XKCD had another Web related comic yesterday, but it trned out to be self-negating. As was noted on Slashdot:
“As I noted yesterday (and was joined by many others)… in an offhand observation xkcd has singlehandedly changed a small section of the Internet. Changing the results from a Google search for “Died in a Blogging Accident” from 2 to (at this writing) over 7,170 in a little more than 24 hours.”
The number of results are now up to 13.3K 66.1K (8/10/08). I guess something like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to the Internet, too.
Update 1/15: Here’s a trend graph from blogpulse for occurrences of “died in a blogging accident” in blogs as of 09:00 gmt+5 on 15 January 2008. Click graph to see current data.
Update 1/16: Google trends shows a sudden interest in the dangers of blogging las week. Here’s a graph from 16 January 2008. Click on the graph to see the current trend graph.
Ebiquity Blog
January 13th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
That’s hilarious!
January 16th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
this is great! I just stumbled the original comic, and without knowing the trend, i immediately searched google for ‘died in a blogging accident’, thus adding to the fury
I F’in love stumbleupon, its giving birth to every corner of the net-o-sphere~
May 12th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I did the same thing as Tim, I was confused for the moment then saw this. I do find this quite amusing.
July 25th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
7,130,000 now. Great stuff.
July 26th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Bill Vincent, you forgot the quotes. It’s more like 15,000 now.
August 4th, 2008 at 9:23 am
What do you mean? “died in a blogging accident” returns over 60,000 results…
August 10th, 2008 at 3:32 am
there’s about 6,170,000 results now. Just so you know.
I love XKCD…
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
…I just want to find the original two results. =|
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I LOVE XKCD!!!!
September 27th, 2008 at 1:32 am
script, search, DATA1, begin
if (DATA1 != 0), #If my number of searches for “Died in a Blogging accident” is not equal to #zero
then (increment(DATA1)) # Increase number of searches by one
end
November 19th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I got to this page by querying Google for “died in a blogging accident”, so I am one of the data points.
/emote waves at fellow data points.
–
Furry cows moo and decompress.
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Lol that is so funny, I just saw the comic and immediately Googled it….What do you know, way more than 2 results!
XKCD rocks!
December 4th, 2008 at 2:03 am
hah.. amazing… just tried it out..
December 10th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
There are also 602,000 results for ‘died in a knitting accident’ now.
December 20th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I wonder if the same will happen for the one about google searches for “X girls Y cups” tho i don’t think I want to try that one.
July 12th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
As of this post, Google gives “about 77,500″ results for “died in a blogging accident” (with quotes). This page is the first result.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Only 1840 for me, one month later… Weird. Anyone can explain?
October 7th, 2009 at 9:19 am
As of 7th October 2009, 10:18pm (GMT+8)
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,020,000 for died in a blogging accident. (0.30 seconds)
Xkcd ftw.
October 13th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
87,600…
I think some people are doing it with quotes, some without
@ Guillermo, I did it with quotes, so I don’t know how you could get that…maybe your advanced search settings or something?
I just love these internet trend things, especially with Google Trends or something similar to see how it changes
November 18th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
I also put the search term in quotes and the number is now 85,200.
And the tide pulls the other direction…