The following is a meta-post of sorts...

March 2007 is through. In March, traffic to louisgray.com reached more than double the previous monthly high in terms of both total unique visitors and page views, thanks to some popularly linked stories, repeat visitors and consistent posting frequency. (See March's traffic spike)

I've found that while I started the blog with a personal bent to cover everything from politics and technology to music and sports, it is the technology posts that are getting more than 90% of the attention, and recognizing that, I've made the adjustment, covering less about Bush and his rival Democrats, fewer daily updates on the Oakland A's or Sacramento Kings, and more focus on blogging trends, Google Reader, LinkedIn, YouTube, Apple, Technorati, and the blogosphere in general.

As a result, visitors are gaining a better understanding of what they will find at louisgray.com. In a graph from SiteMeter showing the 30-day moving average of visitors to the site, the average, hovering in the 30s by end of February and 40s by beginning of March, has more than tripled, by the end of the month, crossing 50 by March 4, 75 by March 12, 100 by March 22, 125 by March 26, and up to 140 or so, where it is today. Some days, like when we wrote about the Apple TV debate being upside down, or gave 10 suggestions for Google Reader, saw more than 500 visitors.



That raises the bar as far as what is expected of me, no doubt, if I am to sustain the momentum. I don't anticipate getting into the thousands of visitors a day, like a Scoble, GigaOM or TechCrunch, but I feel a lot better now that I'm no longer my number one audience. In fact, after a weekend that saw posts reach TechMeme no fewer than 3 times, I've had entrepreneurs e-mailing me their story ideas, in hopes I will cover their site or product on the blog. That's interesting. And just maybe I will. After all, having more than a month's worth of early beta access to Ballhype really helped me understand the value of the site. I was excited to learn late last night that Ballhype was ready to launch, and I told everyone I could today at the office that they should look into it.

Am I an A-lister? Far from it. I'm not filled with self-delusion. But I hope I continue to post items that you find interesting, and that this spike of traffic we saw in March doesn't turn out to have been a fluke. We'll be working to keep the momentum going - up and to the right.

Take the community submitted news engine of Digg or Slashdot, the fanaticism of sports followers from SportsBlogs Nation, sprinkle in Google-like spidering of more than 1,600 sports blogs, and you have what just may be the perfect recipe for a breakthrough destination sports site. Ballhype, who suggests you can "Change the game" and "Hype it Up", offers all this and more, officially launching today after an extensive beta, of which I have been part.

Like Digg, Ballhype users can find new stories and post them to the service. Users can vote to "hype it up" or "vote it down" (like digg and bury), and those stories with the most positive votes rise to the top of the most-hyped list. Like Digg, you can discuss specific stories, but unlike Digg, Ballhype also pulls down stories from around the Web's vast sports blogosphere, from SportsBlogs Nation sites, including Athletics Nation and Sactown Royalty, to others including Deadspin and The Hardball Times.

More than just a story submission and voting site, Ballhype takes fans where they want to go, to a near-live scoreboard showing the day's games from all major sports, including the option to pick the winners before the games start, and have your own win/loss record ranked among the leaders on Ballhype. (I have to admit I started strong but was later shown I should stay out of the sportsbook at Vegas)

Ballhype also features extensive automatic tagging. If I submit a Sacramento Kings story involving Ron Artest, both the Kings and Ron Artest are tagged, and I can see all stories that have the same tags. I can also drill down by team or player, or specific blogs to find out as much or as little as I want to.

But best of all, the site is by the fans, for the fans. Some of the earliest participants, in addition to me, are the very bloggers behind some of the most popular sports sites. Fans have already created groups for "Bay Area Sports", "Basketball Addicts" and "Philadelphia Sports Fans", for example, so those with shared interests can find others who bleed the team colors and bite their nails all the way from preseason to the off-season draft picks. This is fanaticism at its finest, and yet another great example of how the Web can foster community regardless of location.

So, hype it up. After all, an authority no less than TechCrunch already noticed that "Sports Fanatics Will Love This". They will.

The very best April Fools jokes have just enough truth in them for somebody to secretly want them to be true, and to be delivered in such a way that the person being pranked isn't 100 percent sure the joke's on them.

On the Web, Google has made this a black art of sorts, between their "launch" of Google Romance and Google Mars, interspersed with their very real launch of GMail in 2004 that had everybody confused as to whether anybody in their right mind would offer a full gigabyte of e-mail for free. We all know how that turned out. It was real. Those of us (including me) who were sure it was a prank were fooled.

This year, it looks like the blogosphere couldn't keep quiet long enough for the calendars to officially flip to April 1 in the United States. TechCrunch kicked off the festivities by "announcing" they had acquired Phil Kaplan's F***edCompany.com, effectively bringing their coverage of the startup space full circle - from their launch to their eventual death. Many people, including Dave Winer of Scripting.com, were fooled. This was no doubt due in part to ValleyWag's earlier coverage that the famed dotcom deadpool site was up for sale.

That one was good. Very good. Mathew Ingram thought so as well.

Now, Robert Scoble is back from his self-imposed blog exile, saying that Apple is set to release yet another i-Device, called iReader, in collaboration with Cingular, Amazon and Google. I guess if you make up a rumor, you might as well go whole-hog and drop a bunch of company names in there. I'm surprised Nintendo didn't make the cut. He went the tried and true Apple rumor route, citing an unnamed Apple executive dumb enough to use it in public. It might have been too soon for Robert to return to the blogosphere, but hopefully his scoop won't rank among the best by the conclusion of tomorrow.

Last year's April 1 pranks were pretty good. My favorites were Slashdot.org's changing their look and feel from industrial green to My Little Pony pink and China offering to buy Google. (See last year's summary here)

We look forward to more silliness in this most silly of holidays.

The issue of spam blogs, or "splogs" is a big one. As blog software becomes ever more easy to use, it's no surprise that robots and scripts have been built to make fake blogs, and are engineered to look very real, as the splogs usurp other's content and present it either as their own, or as a summary, so that they take traffic away from the original author. Google's Blogger platform was recently given a bunch of grief for being the biggest generator of fake blogs, called on the carpet by no less than Microsoft, who knows quite a bit when it comes to the world of spam.

But of late, some curious changes on the part of Technorati have me wondering if the blog-focused search engine is trying to cull spam blogs from its results database. While obsessing over one's Technorati ranking can become an art unto itself, I've actually seen the total number of blogs linking to louisgray.com decreasing over the last few weeks, which doesn't make sense. In the month of March, as we've seen record traffic and a good deal of popular posts around Google Reader, Digg and Apple TV, the number of blogs linking to louisgray.com has dropped, from 60 last week, down to 55 abruptly, and now today, to 53. Puzzling.

I can only speculate that Technorati is working to delete a massive number of blogs from its database. Those most likely for deletion would be those who don't offer original content. It is certainly a difficult task for Technorati, as some incredible resources, like TechMeme and Megite, offer no original content, but instead, organize links from other authors. How do you determine what is a collection of RSS feeds and links, or what is a real blog?

I hope they first get it right, and second, that everybody's Technorati score is accurate, mine included. The next step would be in my court: increase the blog's community and see if I can accurately, naturally, raise my ranking.