On the first two days of the NCAA tournament, folks accessed 30 million-plus pages on a couple of the websites the company I work for (at the moment) puts up. The best estimate is that between one and five million people were on the site those two days.

Upwards of five million people saw my headlines "Smokin' Szczerbiak!" and "Lobo Long shot dooms Mizzou". These don't necessarily represent my best work, but they're the ones I remember off the top of my head. The fact of the matter is, millions of people are reading what I write, even if most of what I write are headlines. And actually, since people read more headlines than stories, that may not be so bad after all.

A few hundred thousand folks in Los Angeles (and whoever else reads the L.A. Times sports section on the web) read my centerpiece detailing the Clippers first win of the season. I chose a nicely impressionistic photo of fans with bags on their heads and led with the headline "Take off the bags!" Often, the folks in L.A. make drastic changes to what we do. Not that one. That centerpiece stayed up for almost a whole day, which is a lifetime in daily web publishing. I felt pretty good about that.

It's difficult to try and comprehend the numbers, though. The headlines and captions I write are seen by almost as many people as the ones in USA Today (well, at least the NCAA tourney ones are). Alright, it's not a paragon of journalistic integrity, but a lot of people read McPaper. What I do actually makes an impression on a significant percentage of our nation. Yeah, mostly white, mostly male and mostly rich, but still, a good chunk of the pie nonetheless.

The dirty secret behind web publishing is that so few people are actually involved in the production. You know how ESPN.com has those "netboy" ads? Leaving the somewhat humorous impression that one person is putting up the ESPN site? While I don't work for Starwave (the folks in Seattle who put out ESPN.com), I can tell you that there are many times during the day and night when only one person is making all of the editorial decisions at my company. In those moments, I am a singular netboy.

One person, at most three, putting up stuff that millions of people read. This is not unlike the Matt Drudge phenomenon, whereby one incredibly sloppy bastard can misinform the populace in seconds flat. Now, in general, we deal only in sports, which is, in general, not nearly as important as real "news". Though that Olympic scandal is pretty damned important, seeing as entire national governments bribed people.

The fact that so many people search out the information my company provides, however, seems to tell me that what we do is probably important. And that any mistake (and every single person makes multiple mistakes every single shift) has the potential to be seen by upwards of a million people. A heady responsibility which is hard to fathom when you're sitting all by yourself in a darkened building with only the glow of the computer for light.

Where is this going? I still can't believe that millions and millions of people see what I do. Or, for that matter, that I get paid so little for the whole endeavor (another subject entirely). It's weird and exciting. Though, as I'm not a person who scares easily, it's not all that intimidating. After all, my job requires a football cornerback's mentality: If you make a mistake, forget about it. The ball is coming your way again.

No, I just find it odd that my thoughts reach so many people. Do I affect their thinking? Do I make a difference? Or does it all wash away as the electrons flee the screen after the monitor is turned off.

Jon Worley is the person who wrote the headline "Fetid Knicks stink up the United Center." All complaints may be sent to someone else.