Friday, January 4, 2008

What a weird world we occupy here in the blogosphere.


I’ve been at this for about a year now, and have just reached a milestone of sorts with my 100th post – modest by any measure – and I thought it was time to take a look at who was actually paying attention to the random, frequently opinionated nonsense I occasionally send out into the ether. As one would expect, the bulk of the traffic comes from aggregators and affiliate sites, but about 20% or so of the site hits are a result of an internet search.

Those query hits are pretty interesting, and say a lot about the space we occupy – although what, I have no idea. Here, see if you can figure it out ....

The number 1 search that lands readers on my site is Hannah Montana. Back in October, I wrote an entry entitled Who the Hell is Hannah Montana. Since then 24% of all query hits on my site are about Hannah Montana, including two separate queries, a month apart, on “hannah montana’s armpits”. Now you have to imagine the conversation that led up to this query:

BUBBA: Hey, Billy-Bob, do y’all think that there Hannah Montana shaves her pits?
BILLY-BOB: Bubba, she ain’t more than a teeny-bopper. She don’t have no hairy pits.
BUBBA: Whal, I done seen her on that empty-V and she looks old enuf fer me. Betcha a beer and this here ‘coon skin she does too. That Google-thang’ll prove it!
It boggles the mind. And to think this conversation or a variant thereof happened twice!

Also in October I did a piece called
It’s a Voyeurs World, decrying the lack of privacy in this brave new online world. Well as one could expect, “voyeur” is a frequently used search term and resulted in 15% of all query hits to the site. I wasn’t too surprised to see “granny voyeur”, “neighbour voyeur”, “Canadian voyeur” and others as queries, but I wasn’t ready for “Vimy voyeur” and “voyeurisme Vimy”. Having just been to Vimy, I can’t imagine two more unrelated words so whatever those information seekers were expecting to find is beyond my imagination to contemplate. But we’ll never know.

Number 3 on the query list was power tool drag racing. I thought this was a joke when I posted this entry back in July, but I obviously tapped into a huge cult following of power tool drag racers, power tool drag racer wannabe’s, and groupies, with 12% of the query hits looking for information on this burgeoning sport. Who knew?

Federal politics, the subject of probably 50% of my entries, garnered less than 5% of the query hits proving once again that, outside of Ottawa and a few hard-core political junkies, no one gives a shit what happens on the Hill. Perhaps that’s the real message in all of this.

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