Pandering

Condoleezza Rice is having her confirmation hearings today. But meantime, this from the Wonkette:

Blogging: Deep Thoughts
We hear there is a conference at Harvard this weekend on blogging and ethics. They're going to work on some ideas about standards and accountability. So glad Harvard is looking into this because we're not sure anyone could figure out whether or not to trust blogs unless Harvard tells them what the deal is. We look forward to future chin scratching to come on even weightier topics: Crossing the Street: Should You Look?; Mixed Nuts: Why Does the Brazilian Nut Always Wind Up on Top? and Spending Endowment Money: Let's Just Roll Around Naked In It, Shall We?. The upside is that this conference takes place on a weekend, so there's a good chance that everyone will be bombed by noon. Oh wait, it's Harvard. Well, maybe they'll drink a lot of green tea and get gassy.

Meanwhile, this little blog has been getting a whole bunch of hits lately based on picture searches. Specifically, searches for pictures of Courtney Love, preferably wallpaper sized, although some searches have also been for Jimi Hendrix and for Mount Everest. Somewhere, in the archives of this blog, all those pictures exist, and for some reason, the Google searches have started pointing the searchers to this blog today.

So the traffic volume to this blog is still going strong - at least by the low-volume standard of previous months' traffic. Last week, I started getting noticeably more hits after Wampum nominated my MSNBC screenshot of December 12, 2004 for The Koufax Awards: Most Humorous Post. That surge was soon replaced by hits from horny young men Googling after the nude pictures of Damon Gregory's wife. I mentioned Ms. Gregory in my SexBlog 2005 post of January 14, and it amuses me to wonder how many of those Googling Monkeys think that the pictures I posted there were actually of the underdressed and overexposed Ms. Gregory.

But this leads to the question of whether it is pandering to drop words like "Damon Gregory's wife" in a blog that otherwise has nothing to do with Ms. Gregory in an attempt to attract more hits. If I use the terms Courtney Love and Damon Gregory's wife, or even Michael Creighton - State of Fear (whatever happened to all of those hits?), does that constitute pandering, and if so, is that ethical?

Or do I need to go to the Harvard conference to find out?

Oh, by the way, this morning I shaved off my beard.