I once had my own project 'slashdotted', which means it made a thread at slashdot.org. At the time, one small corner of my job was a 'soft pr & help admin' guy, fielding questions for the organization I am associated with (thankfully don't have to do that anymore), and routing and tracking bugs.

Turns out parts of my conversations with 'interested parties' made the content of the original post, and whole sections of my responses to questions ended up on slashdot. (Needless to say, I was quite flattered when it turned out that *my* part of the project, the stuff I designed and built, was some of the most 'propped' stuff out of the whole slew.).

The web is a huge place filled with white noise- but those who use the web for 'signal' constitute a small subset of the web traffic, and they tend to be good at finding out what they want and finding whats interesting. I think thats how people end up at the zone, frankly, is that they are signal generators seeking signal. The point is my project is vaguely cool and at least remotely 1337, but its not RedHat or Oracle or Google or any millions of things that typically dominate tech news. However, its interesting and informative and open to the public. Honey for the Signal seekers.

So that is why it doesn't surprise me that your post turned up. You cast a bit of signal on the waters

Beyond that, Googles ranking system is a lot more complicated than its ideal statement (implementation is ALWAYS a multiplier of the complexity of a concept). Google has had to put a lot of intelligence, as my limitied understanding yields, into its crawler algos to stop 'hacks' from changing web traffic, and prevent porno sites dominating the top links for common queries (Brittney Spears, Disnyland, George Bush etc) by using dynamic hacks and spider traps to influence Google. So its quite possible that somewhere between the DHTML Nexus interface AND the Google internal logic, a bit of complexity happened and PRESTO: Your post tuns up top on the ranking system despite the fact that Google lists it as having no links to it.

If you are hearing coherent fragments of it on FOX, then trust me, people are hitting it. Robert could snoop his traffic and probably tell you how many hits that post has had.

Davin L.