The power of friendship: In four days, Stella review becomes my most read blog post of all time

    People who love Oxford love good restaurants. My favorable review of Oxford’s newest restaurant, Stella, was published Wednesday morning. By midnight Saturday it had been directly accessed 7,160 times, making it the most read blog post I’ve ever written over the course of almost 10 years.
    I’m able to see how many people view my blog and I couldn’t figure out how or why so many people were reading the Stella review. Then I visited restaurant owner Johnny Kirk’s Facebook page and saw where he had not only posted it, but that it had been shared more than 40 times. It pays to have friends!
    Coming in second, with 7,102 direct page views, is a post I wrote several years ago about PSAT National Merit estimated cutoff scores. There is intense national interest in this, so I got a lot of hits from Google.
    My third most-read blog post of all time tells about Wild Bill Schneller thumbing nose, starting fight at 1938 Arkansas game. I wrote this post a number of years ago about the father of a friend, and each year before the Arkansas game it starts to get hits on its own. I made a point of posting it on Facebook this year, as did several others. It has 4,826 lifetime hits, but more than 3,000 of those are in the past month, again due to the fact that a number of young Bill Schneller's friends shared the blog post.
    Some of these “hits” may be from web “bots,” of course. On the other hand, quite a number of people access my blog directly. I still get one or two visits a day from people who click on the link on the late Tom Freeland’s old blog, NMissCommentor.com. At one time I got 15 or 20 visits a day from Tom’s blog.
    To put all of this in perspective, I sometimes write blog posts that get fewer than 100 direct hits (sometimes I don't post them on Facebook). But the hit numbers are really all over the place, from a few hundred to just over a thousand. Only a few posts have gotten over 2,000 direct page views.
    It’s interesting to see the power of social media. But it’s also interesting to see the power of friendship and the desire of people to share good news. Friendship is powerful stuff!