Nothing comes from where I expect

Once again I learn my lesson: What I think is important doesn't matter. What you think is important does. And Google remains the traffic cop for what you think is important.

This week I posted a couple of items here: Firefox 2 spell-check solves CMS problem on Monday, and Raise bar for newspaper design investments on Tuesday.

The Firefox item was little more than a couple of quick, throwaway observations. But I spent a good part of Monday evening and Tuesday lunchtime contemplating and writing the item about newspaper design. I expected that item to get some attention in creative circles, and yield some discussions and disagreements.

And traffic here has indeed run well above average all week, thanks to ... the Firefox item. The design item hardly made a ripple.

It seems plenty of people who are trying out the new Firefox 2 want to know more about the spell-check feature, or can't get it to work. So they search Google and find this site, fresh with an item that covers not Firefox 2 broadly, but the spell-check feature in particular.

I take pride in having optimized this site reasonably well for search engine indexers, and my reward for that is nightly visits from the Googlebot and its kin. But it sometimes leads to unintended effects that I have written about before. Mention MySpace designs and watch people show up looking for themes for their personal pages. Joke about hair regrowth and watch the big-scalp guys come in looking for advice. Mention a then-new e-mail client and you've pretty much opened up a support board for it.

Just as in real conversations with real people, what you say online can be misinterpreted by the bots, or the people who peruse their search results. I'm thankful for the traffic on the Firefox 2 item, but I bet most of the people who get there leave disappointed, especially if they wanted help making the spell-check work. If that's you, the best help I know will be in the Mozilla Knowledge Base (if you can get to it -- been very slow today).