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