"Died in a Blogging Accident"
Becoming a Much More Popular Way To Go

The really humorous web comic XKCD had an excellent exercise in irony recently with a self defeating strip. They made a funny reference to the decreasing number of Google hits you will likely get, the more obscure and benign an activity you insert into the phrase, "Died in a *** accident".

So, you fill in the blank, you get either a few or a lot of hits, depending on the type of death. As you would expect, "Died in a Blogging Accident" is at the bottom with only 5 Google hits. The results shown overall are accurate enough, even with current results, that it shows the strip creator may have really done the searches, instead of making up random numbers.

Unfortunately, the strip is very likely to be mostly read by computer geeks (read a bunch of their archived strips to confirm this), so the question is how many hundreds of thousands of those computer geeks read it and then immediately tested the "results" of the strip, thereby affecting the outcome?

At the bottom of the strip you will see that "Died in a blogging accident" is at 5. My last test showed it has now ballooned to 22,100.

Bloggers . . . be careful out there.

My most current Google results:

Died in a skydiving accident - 863
Died in a elevator accident - 93
Died in a surfing accident - 520
Died in a skateboarding accident - 516
Died in a camping accident - 212
Died in a gardening accident - 263
Died in a ice skating accident - 5
Died in a knitting accident - 1,870
Died in a blogging accident - 22,100

The strip that started it all: