How Internet-Land Can Actually Be Quite Small Sometimes

It is always refreshingly surprising when the vast nature of the internet gives way to a genuine feeling of community, as it did over this past weekend.

On Saturday evening, I checked the traffic statistics for this site to discover a small mini-surge of visitors.  This was really unexpected because The Best Food Blog Ever is just a month old, and I have expended zero effort to publicize it.  Other than a handful of friends, and the occasional visitor drawn to the site by Googling “best food blog”, the site doesn’t get many visitors on a day-to-day basis, and is very much under the radar.

So, a 1300% increase in visitors would naturally catch my attention.  I checked, and most of them were coming from CNN.  I was puzzled because I didn’t really consider our dinner party from last week to be breaking news, but then I pieced together what happened.

You see, The Best Food Blog Ever kind of started on CNN’s iReport website.  I was intrigued when CNN launched their iReport citizen journalist site - pretty much, anyone who wants to submit “news” can do so, and it’s unmoderated and free.   I really didn’t think it was unmoderated, so as a test I foraged through the Make Your Nut archives and posted a story entitled BREAKING - Woodland Creatures Eat Novice Gardener’s Summer Crop.  It wasn’t fake news, it really did happen, but you can’t get more local than the happenings in my backyard.  This was news that pretty much just interested me.

But the most ridiculous thing was, over 1,000 people read the story.

So, I started posting the weekly Thursday Lunch Report to iReport, and for the most part I did it for the lulz.  Every week, on Thursday, I took a picture of what I was eating and threw together a recipe, and posted it to iReport.  My omelet recipe has close to 1,700 views.  Oddly enough, the Thursday Lunch Report was well received, even when I did the simplest of recipes like Eggs in a Basket.  I even got a private message from an iReport producer (hi, Kate) praising my recipes, which was very cool in and of itself.

Having published Make Your Nut for over a year, I was already comfortable with writing on a regular schedule for a blog.  So, a few weeks ago, I decided to turn the idea of the Thursday Lunch Report into a full fledged food blog, which is what you’re reading right now.  Because my time and attention were now turned to developing two blogs, I stopped posting the Thursday Lunch Report.

Last week, I figured it would be the polite thing to do to drop a PM to Kate and the iReport folks to explain my absence, which provoked two reactions - one, an email from a different iReport producer (who, inexplicably, attempted to make my fried rice recipe without ginger, which is totally nutso and for which I disclaim all guarantee of results - he liked it anyway) telling me that he missed the Thursday Lunch Report, and two, this blog post from Kate on the official CNN iReport blog entitled “From iReport to Web Gourmand” talking up my new site.

It was the ultimate coolness, to be sure.  But now I’m getting the guilts over not posting Thursday Lunch Reports, so I may have to drop a happy on them every once in a while.