Image courtesy of zynga.com

Hello NY Times reader

I had a great Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends. In addition to lots of good food, games, time with family, and generally good weather, last night I had the serendipitous privilege of commenting on a NY Times article about Zynga‘s tough work culture.

It is not usual for me to comment on a NY Times article. In fact, until I decided to write the comment, I had not even had an account on the NY Times website. I suppose now that I have an account there, I can go ahead and download the famous NY Times iPad app after all. But I digress. I have at various occasions come across articles in other places where I wanted to comment, but if it asked me to register, I would not take the trouble to write the comment. But for some reason last night, although I was very sleepy, I took the effort to create an account and using the split keyboard on my iPad thumbed in the comment. I even misspelled “heard” as “herd” (the iPad auto-corrected it from some other incorrect word). The reason I took the effort was because I had out of pure chance heard from my friend at church that morning that Zynga was asking employees to return some of their stock options. And… there was no comment on the article. I am always enamored by the opportunity to be the first to comment. So I did.

It turns out, that there were 15 other people who commented before I did, but they were all  waiting for moderation. I had not known that. When I hit ‘submit’ and saw my comment was going to be published only after moderation, my hopes sank. As you can see, the comment I rushed to make in order to be the first, did not have much substance except that it related to what I had heard that morning. And there was no edit button after the submit. So I resigned to the fact that my comment would not be published, and I promptly fell asleep. And while I slept, magic must have happened.

When I checked my mail that morning, there was an email from the NY Times saying my comment was published. Wow, that was nice. Although my blog has been around for almost a year, I usually get less than a a handful of visitors every day. This morning when I checked, there had been 153 views! I was blown away. This was my website’s busiest day. The previous record was around 80+ views in a day. This number has been growing steadily and now it has reached 430 views! Now you know why this post starts with “Hello NY Times reader”.

This from a comment that was below 15 others, had zero recommendations from other readers (while there were many with 30+ recommendations). The lesson for me is to put a link in my comments to my site. It looks like I was the only one who had done it (last time I checked). How much better it would be if I made it a link to a valid related article on my site! That is what I am going to do.

Wish me luck!