I have said it before and will say it again; this blog is for Dani to read when he is older. Plus, anyone else who may find it interesting, funny or just weird!

Very few read it; normally. But all that has just changed. At least this past week… Sort of…

The Dad (or Mum) Bloggers…

Regular readers (and there are not that many) will know that I have said on several occasions that this blog was never intended to generate a mass following. Well that part has certainly worked. The only people who read it are those I send the links to such as family and friends Again, that is OK with me.

Some people write these mum or dad blogs with the intention of enticing thousands of followers. This can lead to a site that generates income if there are enough readers. There is no chance of that happening with my blog. And again, that’s fine by me.

Hit rate…

The Word Press blog site I use gives you statistics on many things. One such tool is the site traffic stats. Normally my weekly number of ‘hits’ hovers around the one hundred mark. So, imagine my surprise when I checked how many ‘hits’ I had received over the past week…

Thousands! Yes, thousands! As if that was not odd enough; they were almost all from China.

What on earth is going on?

A Chinese ‘Google’?

A little investigation revealed that my blog site had popped up on thousands of searches in China on a search engine called ‘baidu.com’. It looks a bit like any Google search page but this company is very definitely Chinese. It has been going since the year 2000.

Naturally, I tried it. I typed a few things – in English obviously – and low and behold my blog popped up near the top of the search list. The very top in one search. That is something that does not happen in our search engines. Unless you pay for it!

What exactly were all those Chinese people searching for I wonder?

Is it because of the ‘one child rule’? Or could it be because that rule has recently been relaxed so many Chinese are now having children much later in life?

If anyone knows please let me know.

Or could it be something else altogether? Read on…

Other search results….

A few links to some medical sites revealed some odd results. Like do older dads have smarter/brainy sons? Another site was about older dads having ‘geekier’ sons. I think Dani fits well into both of those categories at the moment. He is both clever and geeky.

There were even a lot of (how shall I say) more inappropriate sites that popped up in some of the lists. I was beginning to think that searching for anything like ‘old dad’ was just as likely to produce a list of porn related sites. The whole thing may now be less of a mystery. Well at least you have to see the funny side eh?

I wonder if they are typing their search in Chinese or English? All very curious…

15 minutes of fame…

I believe it was that 1960s artist Andy Warhol who said: “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. Well I think this old dad just had his 15 minutes of fame. Albeit on a Chinese search engine. Soon it will be ‘back to reality’.

I just put it all down to a temporary blip in a new Chinese search engine. Pretty soon my blog will drop off the page. Along with any chance of (more than 15 minutes) fame and fortune on the Chinese media.

One last thought:

I wonder how many of you will now go and type “old dad” into the search engine on your phone or PC? Hahaha…