American Idol’s Strange Alliance with MPW

In news we never believed we would report, fans of American Idol are driving additional traffic to MPW. Yes, dear readers, that is not a typo!

Back in June 2008, we wrote a post called “Annapolis Fit Club” in which we noted the excessive eating habits of some members of the Maryland General Assembly and recommended that they attend weight loss bootcamp. The post included this picture of former American Idol co-host Brian Dunkleman, who lost weight using such a procedure on the reality series Celebrity Fit Club.


Well, it turns out that the search engine Bing.com lists that picture in its Brian Dunkleman image page and that anyone who clicks on it is sent to our Annapolis Fit Club post. Since this is the only image listed by Bing of Dunkleman in a bathing suit, that image – and our blog post – is getting a lot of clicks. In fact, that two-year-old blog post could be one of our top ten posts this month.

This is not unprecedented. Readers came out of the woodwork (and other crevices) to view our pieces on British Lucky Paul, and not necessarily because of their interest in Maryland politics. And this image of Miss California generated a TON of traffic to Inside Charm City last summer.


Such is life in the blogosphere. But if one – just one – crazed Brian Dunkleman stalker decides that he or she can’t live without Big Daddy, Robin Ficker or the incomparable Saqib Ali and becomes an educated consumer of Maryland politics, well – let’s just say, Mission Accomplished.