Links to the Marriage Calculator

What's success at an Internet start up company? When something from your site gets written about by lots of folks. If that's the case, the marriage calculator has hit a sweet spot.

Beyond links to a number of smaller blogs and web sites for television stations and newspapers, there are some pretty big dogs in the links.

If you haven't seen it, here are a few of the folks who have written about the calculator, which was put together for us by University of Pennsylvania's Betsey Stevenson, a Wharton assistant professor of business and economic.

Stevenson used statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau to help us with the marriage calculator, which can show you how many people who married at your same age with your same education level are now divorced. The widget also uses those figures to project five years from now how many more folks in your group will be divorced.

Here are some of the blogs and stories that have been written about the widget:

The New York Times
The Baltimore Sun
AOL
UPI
Marketwatch

Marriage Calculator, Gannett layoffs and the NY Times

On the same day that Gannett began sending more journalists to the unemployment line, the Marriage Calculator we rolled out at divorce360.com began making the rounds. It was a bittersweet moment for a former newspaper editor who now works at an Internet start up.

As old friends were e-mailing me on facebook about who was being tapped to leave their newsrooms, the Marriage Calculator was pushing traffic on the site through the roof. We were inundated by new signups who wanted to become part of the site's community. One link to the calculator on walletpop.com was later moved to aol.com's welcome page. Another link from the New York Times Freakonomics blog added to the mix.

According to Google's hot trends for the day, marriage calculator, divorce360.com and divorce calculator were the top search terms -- in order of first to third. Those search terms ranked above: "Week 14 NFL power rankings", "Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair Photo", "the Gator Bowl" and "Britney Spears Good Morning America."

Before the day was over, I couldn't tell whether to laugh or cry. I did both. Someday perhaps journalism will see more days like the one we had yesterday on the site and fewer like the one faced by my former newspaper colleagues. I can only hope.