Are you new round here?

Today I thought I'd try to write some helpful information for everyone who's visiting this blog for the first time, and I figured the best way to do this was to look at all the things they were searching for that brought them here.

Busy, busy, busy

Today I went to the gym, partly because I want to start riding my bike more frequently, and thus feel the need to get Big And Strong. Or at least a bit bigger and stronger. Or at least not have arms so feeble that I can't hold onto the handlebars, or legs so weak that I can't stand on the pedals for more than a moment.

But also because I drank three pints of Wifebeater last night, and needed to clean my system out.

What are people looking for?

It's the last Friday before Halloween, I'm off to Taiwan soon to visit Taroko Gorge, and my computers are misbehaving, so to put myself in the holiday mood I'm going to spend the afternoon peering at data from Google Analytics about what search terms have brought people to this blog. And then writing about it, so there will be strange reflexive effects when people will read about what people did and then perhaps do the same themselves, or search for data about what people did and then ... ok. I'm sorry, I know I should be writing something reasoned and helpful about, say, the modal height of single ladies in mid-first-decade 21st century Britain, but I'll get round to that later.

Anyway, here's what people searched for:

noel gascon"" comedy - I laughed when we took him to see some wild dogs having sex in Tai O, at least
bloomberg free food - no, it's a financial news specialist, not a soup kitchen
jokes about volcanoes - will they like what they see?  will they not?
the cadence of your voice just made my uterus drop out - The 40-Year Old Virgin giveth, and the 40-Year Old Virgin taketh away
agnieszka dislocated shoulder 11 october 2010 blog - I have no idea who Agnieszka might be
bloomberg office free food - see above
cafe milan shaftesbury avenue - a tip on where to eat in London
canteen prince's building - a tip on where to eat in Hong Kong
canteen princes building - the same tip, slightly less satisfactorily
cushtie - the reward of owning cushtie.com
cushtie.co.uk - see above
dislocating shoulder jokes - there are such things?
errornomics joseph hallinan blogger
jokes about vegeterians - people who can't spell vegetarian like me
jokes on volcanoes - to be fair, I've written a few, but that sounds more like the searcher wants a monograph
klein bike - something for the fans of obscure, expensive, no-longer-manufactured bicycles
michael dorsher bloomberg - no, you want dorsher.wordpress.com
people is dislocated shoulder - no, people have dislocated shoulders
polar night half marathon runner's world - which may actually turn out to be useful for somebody
the cadence of your voice just uterus - that pesky 40-Year Old again
volcanoes jokes - back to volcanoes again
http://comments-zero.blogspot.com/ - I think you're typing in the wrong part of your computer...

From this I glean that:

• I'm not attracting that much traffic from random searches, but some people think that this blog might offer them all sorts of answers to medical queries around dislocated shoulders.
• There will always be people searching for jokes about volcanoes.
• Simply typing in lines from films will drive a certain amount of traffic to your site.

Using Excel for Search Engine Optimisation (part 1)

Excel, for all its shortcomings, is an ok tool for handling lots of data - databases are better than spreadsheets, but then you have to be a proper data geek to use them. Excel, on the other hand, is fairly ubiquitous and accessible to beginners. Search engines, particularly Google and latterly Bing, collect vast amounts of data, some of which they share with webmasters and SEO types (through tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools), and which we can then use for search engine optimisation.

All the things people have been searching for recently...

After 9 months and thirteen days of writing a post every day, I thought I'd dip my bucket in the neverending stream of data passing through my Google Analytics account,and list what people have been searching for. And it goes something like this:

cushtie
canteen prince's building
cushtie.com
make mine dean street
jokes about volcanoes
jokes of volcanoes
"accidental nudity" blogurl:blogspot.com
"cafe milan" shaftesbury avenue
bing maps kml example
bings kml "google earth"
caffe milan,shafesbury avenue london
canteen hong kong prince's building
jokes about vegetarians
klein mountain
make mine sandwich dean street
piranha 3d naked
polar night half marathon
seoulprostitutes
shanghai tang armchair
thai buffet old compton street
thai old compton street
thunderstorm in hong kong
tromso half marathon
tromso halfmarathon
wine blogspot
year of eating differently 86 site:comments-zero.blogspot.com

Feel free to click on any or all of these links. You might find something you're interested in. Or you might not. Later today, I'll explain how I made this list...

Things I've discovered by examining my site log data (1)

Somebody keeps searching for "goldschlager airport" and coming here. Well, they might want to get to here, but I'm not sure the sort of person who searches for a funny-tasting drink with metal particles in it really wants to read about the alleged nefarious conspiracies of the British Government to suck suck suck cash out of its (soon-to-be-ex) dependencies.  Then again, maybe it's because I trained my gibberish generator to talk about goldschlager a lot, but I only did that because I was already getting searches for this.

Perhaps I'm trapped in an endless cycle of people searching for "goldschlager airport", coming here, being unsatisfied (but not unsatisfied enough to tell me) and then further optimising the site to attract more of them.  Or else there are some alcoholic pilots trying to do their research.  Or there's something a tiny bit wrong with Google's search results.  Who's to say?

Playing with language

Today I was looking at Get TEDPad, where a chap has run some statistical analysis against transcripts of the first five hundred or so TED lectures, and figured out how to generate snippets of new, non-existent TED speeches that sound either convincing and good quality English, or (when he switches it to the dark side) good quality English spoken by an idiot obsessed by whatever the New York Times tells him is important at this particular moment in time.