Mid2Mod: Google Doodle

Showing posts with label Google Doodle. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Google Doodles...gotta love 'em

It's a little past midnight as I write this post, and the March 27 Google Doodle honoring of the 126th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has gone on to the Big Google Doodle Archive in the Sky. It was the subject of a number of blog entries yesterday, but I believe that it...along with other Google Doodles of interest to mid-century mavens...deserves one more look.

Mies van der Rohe Doodle
google.com

Usually Google Doodles involving mid-century design/culture take me by surprise. Even though I do many biographical posts, remembering birthdays is not my strong suit. To be honest, I do well to remember the birthdays of my immediate family. So, no, I'm not waiting with bated breath to see what Google is going to come up with in honor of the next designer's birthday.

Instead, what alerts me is unusual activity on my blog. Yesterday when I woke up and did the obligatory check of email and the blog, I found that I had received almost 2,000 hits since going to bed a few hours earlier. The final tally for the day was over 6,000 hits.

I'm a little slow on the uptake, so I was puzzled until I started reading posts from my favorite fellow bloggers. After seeing several nods to the Google Doodle, the reason for the spike in hits was clear. This has happened a couple of times before...first when the Alexander Calder Doodle appeared, causing an incredible 17,000+ spike of my blog hits, and again the day the Marimekko Doodles ran, with a much smaller but still noticeable spike.

Calder 113th Birthday Doodle
google.com

Marimekko First Day of Spring Doodle
google.com

Marimekko First Day of Fall Doodle
google.com

Don't get me wrong. I'm not all about the numbers. The Google Doodles have an intrinsic coolness that can't be denied. Take, for instance, the interactive Doodles. You can watch a clip of I Love Lucy on the Doodle commemorating Lucille Ball's 100th birthday. Or you can record a tune on the Les Paul Doodle celebrating the guitar virtuoso's 96th birthday. Or you can even play PAC-MAN on the Doodle honoring the game's 30th anniversary.

But let's be honest. In the blogosphere, as well as in other social media, we love anything that drives traffic to our sites...and Google Doodles definitely do that. That makes them extra cool in my book.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

"I think best in wire." --Alexander Calder

At first I thought my Blogger account had gone all wonky on me. I was having an unprecedented number of page views Thursday...four times what I usually have on a good day. I noticed that most of them were on a post I wrote months ago about Alexander Calder and mobiles, which has always logged the most views of all my posts. Still, I was suspicious that it was a glitch, even though I had comments from several readers I'd never seen before.

When I got up yesterday morning, I looked at my stats, and the page views for the day had shot up to more than 16,000 overnight. That cinched it. I was ready to contact Blogger and tell them my account was fried...till I looked at Google. It turned out that Google was celebrating the 113th anniversary of Calder's birth on July 22, 1898, by having a mobile in the well-known "Google Doodle" spot. When I clicked to read more about the artist, I found that my post was on Google's first page. That explained it. By 7:00 p.m., when the counter rolled over, my hits for the day had reached 17,955. Crazy! I'm still shaking my head in disbelief. I never knew the Google Doodle had that kind of impact on web searches. (The Calder Doodle is gone, and today is back to normal, incidentally.)

But thank you, Google, for driving so much new traffic my way yesterday... and thank you, Alexander Calder.