Random Notes From Dead Tree Edition's First Year

This blog officially turned one on Oct. 13, and even I forgot to say Happy Birthday. Here are a few factoids from the first year:

• Most popular article: The Unofficial Guide to Flats Sequencing, with 20,056 page views. Postal employees and mailers alike wonder what impact the huge Flats Sequencing System machines will have and are dissatisfied with the information the U.S. Postal Service has provided.
  
• Absolute unique visitors (a Google Analytics terms): 115,109. Some visitors were "more unique" than others.
  
• Visits: 222,480.
  
• Total page views: 295,696. Darn, I didn't make it to 300,000.
• Biggest source of visitors: Postalnews.com. It sent me eight times more traffic than all of the search engines combined. That's either a testament to the loyal following Postalnews has built by aggregating postal-related links or a commentary on my weak search-engine optimization skills.
• Most popular search term that led people to Dead Tree Edition: "dead tree edition" and variations thereof. Second most popular was "quebecor world", a company that has certainly had an eventful year and is now known as Worldcolor.
• Search term I totally own: "cardboard porn". The last time I tried that search in Google, Dead Tree Edition had the top two slots. Put the search term in quotation marks and it's tops at Yahoo! and Bing as well. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of people are searching on the term. And I'm not sure how many of those who do search on it want to read how a recycling-information phone number was taken over by a telephone-sex outfit.
  
• Biggest rip-off: On August 23, I published an article that began, "To cope with declining volumes of catalogs and periodicals, the U.S. Postal Service is adding nearly 300 ZIP codes to the list of areas that will be served by the Flats Sequencing System." Three days later, Multichannel Merchant published an article with a staff writer's byline that began: "Due to declining volumes of catalogs and periodicals, the U.S. Postal Service is adding nearly 300 zip codes to the list of areas that will be served by the Flats Sequencing System." Much of the rest of the article is lifted word-for-word from mine, with no link to or mention of Dead Tree Edition. I have repeatedly tried to get MM, a leading publication serving the catalog industry, to quote from or mention this blog, but I've never succeeded. Do you suppose it will link to this article?