Osler's Razor

Over the past three years of blogging daily, I look back and two posts have received far more hits than any of the others. Sadly, those two have nothing to do with Baylor, sentencing, pandas, or haiku. What they are tells us a lot about the internet and how it works.

By far, the post which received the most hits was positively inane: It was this piece in which I ranked breakfast cereals. You may wonder why this rose to the top, and the answer is simple: It was linked on a far more popular site than this one, Brian Leiter's Law School Reports blog. Intriguingly, though, many of the people who first migrated over to check out the cereal listing now return regularly.

Number two was this rant about General Motors. The traffic was driven by the post's appearance on Yahoo's front financial page, for reasons I don't know. Interestingly, after that I had (and still have) many visitors and commenters from GM.com addresses. If you pull up the GM posts, you will see that the GM apologists argued that things were great right up to bankruptcy. In fact, one of the great ironies was that the execs who dragged the company into the dirt argued in the end that if GM went into bankruptcy, the company would be liquidated and the process would take years. Oops. The company is now out of bankruptcy, after 42 days, and many of those executives are now gone. Hopefully, they will spend more time on designing and building cars and less time monitoring what bloggers are saying.