…well kinda

As I was sitting at my computer today watching my blog traffic, big nerd I know, I started to notice these strange trends appear on my Feedjit. I was receiving referral hits from CNN, and every time I would try to follow the referring link it would lead me to some obscure location that showed the weather for little towns in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Georgia. Not giving it much thought I quickly dismissed it and went on my way.

Later this evening I checked my traffic again and saw that I was periodically receiving more hits. Confused but this pattern I started to do more research into this strange CNN referral. What I found out was that I was receiving hits fromCNN people’s personal CNN homepage under the category titled “Headlines From…”. After following it a little bit closer I noticed that the headlines section was provided by a website called Outside.in.

For whatever reason, this service tagged my blog as being a credible news source (funny right?) and gave our class blog, more specifically our Chile Pepper blog post, top billing on local Fayetteville headlines over such articles about politics, local sports, and another Chile Pepper Race recap that was actually written by a local newspaper. Not real sure how this happened or what to make of it really but there is a lesson to be learned here…if you have a traffic feed, watch it closely. You never know what you might learn about your website…it just might be a credible CNN worthy website.

Mr. McClung