the Swerve effect spikes blog traffic

One of the amazing things about the blog world, also known as the "blogosphere", is how one blog link in a popular high-traffic blog entry can generate tons of traffic at a smaller less-trafficked blog. This extra readership traffic spikes the web statistics and even sometimes bring a web server to a crawl. (Some blog servers can't handle that much traffic.) This kind of thing is called the Slashdot effect, the Digg effect, the TechCrunch effect, or the BoingBoing effect, when a blog gets mentioned by a SuperBlog.

Now there may be another blog phenomena that I'm calling the Swerve effect. You heard it here first -- I'm coining the phrase. The Swerve blog is the blog of LifeChurch.tv, mostly written by the dynamic duo of Craig Groeschel (Senior Pastor) and Bobby Gruenewald (Innovation Leader & Pastor). Yes, their names are hard to spell, and so is mine. I'd love to see Terry Storch (Digerati Director at LifeChurch.tv) join the Swerve authoring team.

The Swerve effect recently touched one of Digital contributor here, Cynthia Ware, who also blogs over at The Digital Sanctuary. Her blog was featured at Swerve last week, and here's how she describes the effect:

... the Swerve thing caught me so off guard that when my site meter went crazy I thought for a second I had been hijacked by a spam bot. 

Upon further search, I noticed hundreds of hits all from Swerve and it pretty much blew away anything else I've ever experienced in terms of blogging traffic.

Congratulations, Cynthia! And may you too be blessed (or cursed?) with the Swerve effect for your blogging habits.

-- DJ Chuang, Director of Digital Initiatives & more, Leadership Network