Current events, keywords, and my hit counter

Near the beginning of May I installed a new hit counter on my blog. I got it at goodcounter.org

One of the things I like about it is that it has an invisible mode: you can't actually see it. (There is a visible hit counter at the bottom of the sidebar, but that's the old one. I may get rid of it soon.) Another thing I like about it is that it gives you some stats. Among them, if you get a hit from a search engine, it shows you the keyword.

The three keywords that have generated the most hits for me, in reverse order: tritinas, Zipingku Dam, Anna Goeldi.

People searching for tritinas or some variation thereof generated a lot of hits early on. That's died out: perhaps there was a class assignment somewhere that was sending desperate college students to Google. I hope they found my tritinas helpful.

Zipingku Dam got a lot of hits in the wake of the earthquake and flood fears. I expect that will die down now too.

Anna Goeldi is now my top hit generator. I wrote that poem last fall after reading a BBC story about the Goeldi case. The story mentioned that a local journalist had written a book about the case. Apparently he managed to get a fair number of people's attention, because the cantonal government has now moved to rehabilitate poor Anna. (Rehabilitation, in this case, means more than exoneration which would be a simple declaration that she was not guilty. It involves an acknowledgment that her arrest, torture and execution were unjust from the very start. The term "judicial murder" has been used.)

I found this out because I suddenly started getting a huge number of hits from Google and other search engines, of people searching for "Anna Goeldi". Figuring something must be up, I Googled her myself and found my poem wedged in among a bunch of news stories concerning the rehab effort.

It's nice to see an attempt toward justice, even if it's largely symbolic after more than 200 years. Plus, it's fun to imagine people earnestly browsing news stories, and suddenly finding themselves grappling with a sonnet...

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