Have you ever written something that isn't within your areas of expertise and regretted writing it? Does an article keep coming back to haunt you? This has happened to me three times so far. Short of deleting the original article, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

When I wrote Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal, I opened up a veritable can of worms. Steve of Ramblings from the Marginalized submitted it to Digg on March 20th, 2007. According to my stats at the time, it was viewed more than 11,000 times that day. It was at the top of the front page for hours.

On July 18th or 19th (depending on your time zone), someone visiting from StumbleUpon decided to stumble the article and it received another 4,000 page views before it slowed down. I wrote about it in my article, Yesterday - Another Banner Day for Untwisted Vortex!

Approximately 8 hours ago, someone visiting from StumbleUpon spotted it again and gave it a thumbs down. It might has well have been a thumbs up because it's been viewed more than 400 times today. I have no idea how many visitors it will generate before it slows down again.

I specifically excluded the article from my "Popular Posts" widget, along with quite a few others, because that's not the kind of image I want to project for my blog. I realize that some bloggers would just about kill for traffic like that, but it's not the kind of traffic I'm looking for. Perhaps I'm "looking a gift horse in the mouth". According to the latest statistics from Google Analytics, that article alone has generated more than 55,000 page views.