I think Timo must have played an important part in this transformation of the Finnish population.
In order to get my wife interested in talking about this document I'd have to buy her a day at the spa, and even then she would only agree to LISTEN to me talking about my blog while I drive her to the place (all the while staring out the window thinking about which services she will take when she gets there).
Timo on the other hand outlines in a recent blog posting how it was that he managed to transform Finland into the center of the Mar Saba universe (or at least how he managed to raise the Alexa score of his blog). After all as he notes:
I confess freely that from February 1st, 2010 onwards I did a number of small tweaks that I knew would transform my Alexa rating for the better.
He says moreover:
There are lots of friends who are not actively reading my blog since my target audience is pretty niche; people interested in Clement's letter to Theodore and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark it has two extracts of. So I hinted that everyone was welcome to stop by and check out a post or two, inviting other people to do likewise. Some of my friends seem to have taken this suggestion quite seriously, as my normally international audience (judging by the origins of IP addresses) was c. 97% Finnish past February. Thanks, and you can lay it off now, guys!
But with regards to 'cheating' he writes:
For every situation there is always the option to cheat. Alexa rating is quite forgiving in this regard, as it is practically impossible to get caught red-handed. Whether one utilizes commercial software (link withheld), community-based efforts (link withheld), or simple scripts that utilize anonymous proxies for generating unique hits IP address wise (link withheld), it is certainly possible to gain a very low Alexa ranking. The legitimate means can easily get you under 1,000,000, as happened with this blog.
Wow Timo must certainly have half of Finland as friends of his. Indeed he must be like the Elvis of Finland for even after he implored his fans to stop reading his site earlier in month keep making the site go higher and higher.
It was a little over a month ago that I was pleading with people reading my site to go over to his blog to actually have it register at Alexa.
Now this blog Timo admits is 'pretty niche' is now suddenly ranked by Alexa in the top ten Biblioblogs in the world AND as the 1,809th site of ALL WEB ADDRESSES in Finland! Here are some quick Alexa ranking comparisons for the websites for the top ten companies in Finland (taken from uranus.fi):
10. Nordea Pankki Suomi (Finance and investment) - 17 place in Finland
1. Nokia (Electronics) 222 place in Finland
salainenevankelista.blogspot.com 1,809 place in Finland
2. Stora Enso (Forest) 2,006th place in Finland
6. SOK (Wholesale trade/ Daily goods) - 2186th place in Finland
5. Kesko (Wholesale trade/ Daily goods) - 3,311 place in Finland
4. UPM-Kymmene (Forest) - 9,011 place in Finland
7. Metsäliitto (Forest) - 12,663 place in Finland
3. Neste Oil (Oil Trade) - (not even ranked among top Finnish sites)
8. Outokumpu (Mining, metals, metal products) - (not even ranked)
9. Metso (Mining, metals, metal products) - (not even ranked)
This is what I mean. Finnish people are clearly demonstrated to disproportionately interested in the Mar Saba document, so much so that not only does Timo's blog beat eight out of the ten biggest companies in Finland (the only ones he does not best are Nokia and the largest bank in the country) but the site beats the official sites of multinational companies such as Coke, Pepsi, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and almost every imaginable other company's official Finnish site.
For these reasons alone I think it is clear that when and if the Mar Saba document is recovered it should be kept in Helsinki ...
