Kroll, the City of London Police and my blog

Happy new year dear blog readers.

Last year this blog had its biggest ever-readership
27,000 hits for 2010, up from 22,000 hits in 2009. Alas, its not quite call for skipping round the office, high-fiving my online journalistic success, the number of returning visitors has declined. I see these people as being folk I used to go drinking with before I moved to London, and slowly they're forgetting I exist.

Furthermore, it was in the first half of the year when the site got the most visitors.

The most popular posts being ones where I'd used magic google-juice to summon the search engine traffic (putting the right key words in the url), such as the Hollie Creig story and the Paul Chambers Twitter Joke thing.

For the latter half of the year, I've been blogging less and my subject matter has been boring.

That said, there's been one or two exciting moments, like when I blogged a moan about my temp agency messing up passing me for a week, and within minutes of clicking "PUBLISH POST", my mobile ringing with someone from their head office, raining down a firestorm on the local office, I got my money in the end. I feel a little guilty cos I was partly to blame. Anyhoo, I took that post down, fearing for my job, even though the company I work in are quite different from the company who pays me.

There was another thrilling post where I was frustrated by the amount of time it was taking my former housing renting landlord folk to give me my deposit back. They took a few hours before phoning me, the money arrived shortly after and they even phoned back the next day to ask that I update the blog post.

This is the future, rather than actually phoning helplines, just write arsey blogpost about stuff, let google do its work and someone else can run round resolving any problems.

Its a thrilling way to live.

The other week I was inspired to write a blogpost about some banner that had been strung up over a road, this blogpost in fact.

One thing I didn't mention in the original post was Kroll, they're a private investigation company who it is alleged under the auspices of Guy Carpenter, persuaded the City of London Police to expend vast resources on bringing Ian Puddick to justice.

A day or two after I clicked publish post, I noticed a Kroll ISP address in the server logs, as having read my blog. I was terrified, I felt threatened and intimidated. So, in a funk I took the blogpost offline until my nerves had calmed and I'd stopped shaking. It took quite a few sleepless nights, but eventually I thought "fuck it, live by the blog, die by the blog". I've lost countless relationships and jobs cos of this philosophy, I'm crazy, but I get the job done.

Its a weird thing about threatening and intimidating things, its all in the eye of the beholder.

I discovered a neat thing about my ADSL wifi routery thing, I can rename it anything, and so whenever my neighbours search for their networks they'll find one nearby called "MI5 mobile surveillance unit 23".

Is it Kroll's fault that I felt threatened by their ISP's appearance in my server logs? Well yes, they did hunt down my website. On the other hand I am just being a pussy by being intimidated by such things?

I dunno. Should I fuck with Kroll? Probly not. But does this blogpost count as fucking with Kroll? Well, that's up to them, innit?

There is another angle...

As part of my job, I spend hours at work randomly surfing the web, reading up on episodes of Lost or V or obscure statistics about far off lands. Its not really part of my job, just that I am incapable of doing productive work unless I have some kind of inoffensive release for my curious mind, without it, my work rate would fall.

Perhaps, Kroll appeared in my server logs because my counterpart, some underpaid temp at Kroll, was bored in his lunch break and arrived at the aforementioned blogpost randomly, with no prejudice or malicious intent.

This is how wars start, people feeling needlessly threatened. We could all do with being a little more like Samantha Smith.