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Between 10:30-11 p.m. Friday, Headline Surfer experienced a major spike in users, no doubt fueled by the trending story on John's Appliances pegged to the Mayan calendar calamity tale. Between 248 and 281 Internet users were clicking the headline to the story as shown in a series of snapshots above from the top right of the website.
DAYTONA BEACH -- Headline Surfer's mid-afternoon Friday story on John's Appliance and Bedding's blow-out sale announcement pegged to the Mayan calendar calamity was a big hit locally and around the world well into the night.
The story headlined "Owner of Daytona Area's John's Appliance sees Mayan Calendar as segway to year-end blow-out sale" was the 24/7 Internet newspaper's way of making a local story out of the hype building across the globe of the Mayan prediction of the end of the world.
The John's Appliance Store Mayan story remained in the Google news directory for South Daytona six days after posting.
And what better way than with John Hinton, proprietor of the South Daytona appliance guru known for his zany TV commercials and large display newspaper print ads.
The snapshot to he left shows Headline Surfer's story (via NSBNews.net) on the Mayan hype was No. 1 in a general Google search for Daytona-related news.
The story was popular for the way Hinton was portrayed in the writing and a photograph where he was hamming it up with his last meal, a cheeseburger, to go tongue-in-cheek with the Mayan calendar day of doom.
The story was popular for the way Hinton was portrayed in the writing and a photograph where he was hamming it up with his last meal, a cheeseburger, to go tongue-in-cheek with the Mayan calendar day of doom.
And Hinton played it to the hilt in pushing his year-end sale, if there was to be another day for mankind.
Headline Surfer's Mayan story stayed at the top of the Google News Directories for Daytona Beach, FL, well into the overnight hours.
The snapshot to the left shows Headline Surfer's story (via NSBNews.net) was on the third page of a Google search for "Mayan news sales) lat afternoon Friday.
Still, it remained the top story listed in the South Daytona news directory well into the weekend. Here on a Thursday morning six days later, it was still showing on the bottom of that listing.
The Mayan story was a boost for Headline Surfer's analytics on a Friday night, when typically the half hour between 10:30-11 p.m., there are between 5 and 15 users at any one time, unless major breaking news is posted. On this particular night, though, as the Mayan story continued to trend in the search engines from the consistent reads over the previous several hours, activity on the site mushroomed, with between 248 and 281 users on at any one time for that half hour.
The only way to really explain it is as online users in the major search engines -- Google, Bing and Yahoo -- were searching the headlines with keywords such as "Mayan" "Calendar" "end" and "world," the Headline Surfer popped up either under our URLs for NSBNews.net or HeadlineSurfer.com (our two site access domains, along with a third less frequently used VolusiaNews.net).
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The snapshot at left shows a record 1,076 accessing Headline Surfer at the same time to read the 24/7 Internet newspaper's local story on the death of American astronaut Neil Armstrong.
And while the John's Appliance Mayan calendar story was a big hit, it pales in comparison to Headline Surfer's Aug. 26 story on the death of Apollo moon-walking astronaut Neil Armstrong with then-State Rep. Dorothy Hukill as the local lead-in voice. Hukill was elected to the Florida Senate in November.
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