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The Google Zeitgeist page is always an interesting, although sometimes depressing, snapshot of what people are interested in / searching for.

This week the top ten search terms are

1. masters
2. pet food recall
3. good friday
4. wrestlemania 23
5. mlb extra innings
6. easter bunny
7. rose mcgowan
8. lauren conrad
9. keith richards
10. blades of glory

It also struck me that if you then use these words in your blog post at the beginning of the week, by the end of the week you will be attracting some of those people searching for information on the ‘pet food recall’ or ‘wrestlemania 23′. Of course I would never advocate pure cheating and the junk content that entails but nevertheless, if some of those words can be worked into the post you where going to write anyway … Keith Richards, the pet food recall and wrestlemania.

Continue reading ‘The Keith Richards wrestlemania pet food recall’

There was an interesting post on the Celcias blog about a huge surge in awareness of climate change a while back. I’ve been wondering whether this is a trend that will continue.

I’ve always been interested in how ideas spread, especially important ideas. And I’ve always been interested in ways of tracking how widely an idea is spreading over time.

It’s only a certain type of person who blogs so using the blogsphere as a measure of general consciousness is flawed. Nevertheless, there are a lot of bloggers out there, and when you look at what they are saying over a given period of time you can get a useful measure of how an idea is spreading.

So I thought I’d pop over to Technorati to see how often the term ‘climate change’ is being mentioned in the blogsphere. This handy little graph shows that massive surge talked about on Celcias. It doesn’t look like the increased interest was a permanent change but there is a definite trend.

It would be interesting to look at what was happening at the time of that big spike.

Here’s some related real time graphs.

Posts that contain "climate Change" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" And Greenpeace per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I want me some tags and I want me a tag cloud. And i want it now so I’ve grabbed the ultimate tag warrior plugin (which looks to be a homegrown kiwi wordpress plugin!). had to make a few adjustments to make it play nicelywith the mod_rewrite in the .htaccess but looks to be working now … I think. Hence the waffly post about posting which is about enough of that … time to tag it. See if this little puppy works. The tag cloud on the front page should grow over time and start to show which tags are the most popular (at least with me) and thereby show what the blog is really about (or at least what I think it is about) but also give you the user a nifty alternative way of browsing. Clicking on a given tag will show you all the posts that have been tagged with that tag. Voila.