Some websites work....but why?

We experimented this past year with a "group blog" which was about how the web and homeschooling. We invited (actually paid) half a dozen Time4Learning mother's to write two times per week in a blog on whatever their thoughts were on their Time4Learning experience. We encouraged them to react to each other and we were hoping to have it as a sort of ongoing focus group about their use of various homeschooling curriculum (homeschooling curricula?).

We learned alot about our users and how our service works from them. We were also interested in whether the blog would pick up a readership or any Google rank. Answer, after several months delay, it has started picking up good traffic from the search engines. It's not clear that it has any regular readers. And one article, on how has the internet changed your life, is by far the most popular. It alone pulls in almost half the traffic. I'm not entirely sure why, I think it got picked up on some blog service as highly picked (stumbled upon or favorited or tagged or whatever).

We reall