My biggest “story” in 2011 (not my favorite, but certainly the “most popular”) was finding Anders Breivik’s 2083 manifesto online and getting it to someone in the media. I haven’t discussed it much, and I wasn’t asked to discuss it except for my pal David Harris for his podcast.And I’m not going to talk about it too much here either. This may be the most boring post I’ve made in a while, in fact, but maybe you’re curious…
Here are the blog posts I made on the subject, in order of appearance:
- Anders Behring Breivik | Probable facebook/twitter pages of Oslo bomber/gunner Posted onÂ
- Anders Behring Breivik’s comments with Document.no (Translated) Posted onÂ
- Anders Behring Breivik | 2083 Manifesto and Movie: Real or Not? Posted onÂ
- Anders Behring Breivik | 2083 A European Declaration of Independence | Manifesto Posted onÂ
- Anders Behring Breivik | Is this the e-mail he sent to friends with 2083 Manifesto? Posted onÂ
- STATUSÂ “STATEMENT:Â It appears that Massimo Introvigne is fabricating and spreading unchecked rumors and making unfounded implications…” Posted onÂ
- An open letter to Massimo Introvigne…. Posted onÂ
- Response from Massimo Introvigne Posted onÂ
In that last one I state that I’m going to write a blog post on Introvigne’s misinformation and the false linking of Breivik to myself or the Church of Satan. That never happened, mainly because it only seemed to have picked up traction among the lunatic fringe and strange foreign press. This means I may be on some “no fly list” for Botswana or other shithole, but the misinformation would probably have no “real world” effect on me, and any statement made past what I’d already said in the “open letter” would probably be pointless. It ain’t going to convince the kooks, and no serious news source had picked up on it.
So what DID happen?
First, it can bring your website down. This site was offline for many hours after it really hit that I was hosting a found copy of the manifesto.
Very few people came to this site before I had the manifesto up, and then WHAM:
As you can read, this chart is plotting out traffic by week, with a few months before and everything since. It’s still rare that the manifesto posts aren’t some of the top pages viewed in a day, but I actually DO manage to post some interesting things now and again that generate their own traffic.
Here’s a chart less bar-graph, more real numbers:
I actually had taken my website down for a good part of June of this year.
So where the hell was all that traffic coming from? Here’s a snapshot of 7-24-2011:
So, when it was going on, I was curious what people were looking at OTHER than the posts about Breivik. Hell, there were only 102 hits on the “contact” page… I guess after reading my bio on the “about” page, they weren’t so interested in chatting me up.
So, all in all, I’m still getting a lot of residual traffic, but I don’t think it’s actually helped anything else that I do. That wasn’t the goal, and I did my best to not comment on the whole thing and just maintain conservative speculations and stating facts.
So, I was mentioned by name on the New York Times website, there’s a tag of my name on gawker ( http://gawker.com/kevin-slaughter/ ) and I’ve seen how the two phrases “American blogger Kevin Slaughter” and “Kevin Slaughter, priest in the Church of Satan” translates into many different languages  (you see, it depended on if they used Introvigne or a REAL news source to quote from).
 (UPDATE)
Through ALEXA.com I easily scrambled up a bunch of the websites that deep linked directly to the PDF on my website, you know, instead of linking to the blog post itself…