The Bonney Bump

Mother & Daughter, 2012

If you’re a regular viewer of The Colbert Report, you’re familiar with “the Colbert bump,” the boost host Stephen Colbert says being on his show gives to whatever enterprises—movies, books, records, political campaigns, etc.—his guests are promoting.

It seems my daughter has the same power. I posted a picture at Flickr yesterday that shows my wife’s and daughter’s pocket books left against a wall at my daughter’s office. I thought the contrast between the two bags was interesting. (I’ll let you guess which bag goes with which lady.) I didn’t think, though, that it would attract much attention at Flickr.

So you can imagine my surprise when I happened to notice about an hour later that almost eight hundred people had looked at the picture. That’s a lot more people than usually look at my pictures by a factor of…well, let’s just say a whole lot.

At first I didn’t know where this traffic was coming from. Most of it came from an Internet domain I didn’t recognize. By mid-morning the count was almost to a thousand. When I checked back in later in the day the count had just crossed 1,300 views.

It took a little sleuthing, but I finally traced all the attention to a brief post and link by my daughter at her Twitter feed. It seems the Design*Sponge “bump” is pretty powerful.  I sure hope I don’t get on her bad side.