A few years ago, I discovered that several pages on MySpace were using images from the Shore Leave site as backgrounds. And then, every so often, someone would go and put one of the photos into a comment on a message board. But rather than copying the photos, they were loading them directly from the web site.
At the time, I talked with one of the con chairs and we decided that rather than “blocking” the images, we’d make some lemonade from the situation. Nowadays, if you view any of the archived photos on the site, you’ll discover that they have the site’s address embedded in them. (In effect, every time someone links to an image, they end up giving Shore Leave some free advertising.)
Looking at the server logs last night, I discovered Shore Leave had been getting a significant amount of traffic from Fark.com (the amount of traffic coming in via Fark in the previous 14 hours was about 4-5 times as much as what came in from from Google, Yahoo, and everyone else combined in the preceding 48). It turned out Fark was running a thread about a would-be robber who was armed with a spork. The fifth response in the thread included a photo of a very familiar convention hallway.
I’m taking the view that all those people (more than 1,000 as of 24 hours ago) seeing the archived photo of Spork Man is a wonderful way to get publicity at very little cost. And to keep myself amused, I’ve lightly edited the photo to say hello.
And who knows? Perhaps Slashdot will provide the next link! 🙂