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Friday, September 01, 2006

 

The ongoing saga of the Ikea incident

I can see you rolling your eyes. Again with the Ikea thing, you say with a sigh. Yes, again. I’m sorry – I just can’t help myself.

I may be accused of milking the whole ikea dog weiner issue, but I must tell you how utterly captivated I have been by the traffic stats this week. I’ve been following the referral logs more assiduously than usual, and I am fascinated by the patterns that are emerging.

The first time we talked about it was last Wednesday, and the search hits were almost exclusively from southern Ontario. I think CFNY radio mentioned it about the same time we started talking about it, and that’s when the search hits started.

By the weekend, the Canadian media had picked up the story, and I was getting search hits from all over Canada – by the hundreds, each day, all containing some variation on {Ikea catalogue dog leg family fold-out cover page 2 penis.} I figured the big traffic spike on Monday would be the end of it, but it continued into Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday turned out to be the biggest traffic day to date. This story, if you’ll pardon the pun, has legs!

As the week progressed, the hits came from farther and farther afield. You can trace the pickup of the story in the international media as the hits stream in from a particular country.

Tuesday, it was mostly from American destinations, and by Wednesday, the hits were coming from Ireland, Denmark, Germany, and more than a few from Sweden. (Which makes me retrospectively glad that I never posted the picture here myself – better safe than sorry!) I even got a couple of hits from a translation service in China, and then Thursday I got more hits from Belgium (Belguim!) than any other country – including Canada and the US.

See for yourself (sorry, there was supposed to be another image here, but Blogger deems me not worthy of an image today; you can click through if you want to admire my amazing traffic spike) … and now that traffic spike is looking more than a little phallic, wouldn’t you say?

So, welcome Belgians and other visitors. The original posts are about to start dropping off the page, but we have the information you’re looking for – the infamous Ikea dog picture is here, courtesy of Canada’s CTV.ca. But do feel free to pull up a chair and stay a while. We’ve been having other interesting conversations this week about Happy Meal toys and teenage angst, among other things.

And don't think in the rush of new visitors seeking Swedish furniture porn that I've forgotten about those of you who drop by for coffee and conversation every day. Hey, maybe we can turn this into a comment game?

Ikea is obviously going to be looking for some new staff in their production and design team. If you were charged with coming up with those catchy Scandanavian product names, which product would you want to name and what would you name it?

For example, I'd name the dog bowl and matching placemats the BÄÄRK series. And those pretty coloured cocktail glasses: BLOTTO. Now you go!