Dom Davis (The Blog)

I manage to blag a Google+ invite yesterday. If you’re not sure what Google+ is think “Facebook, but less blue”. As a concept it provides some interesting features, especially round the grouping of contacts which means, for me, it could actually fit into all the rest of the social media outlets I have.

My Facebook is quite private. I ignore many friend requests because I don’t actually want to worry about who might read what I’m writing and my privacy settings are such I don’t have to worry about prospective employers reading stuff years down the line. I have a no work colleagues rule. You get added when I move on. It’s also where most of my social networking is done.

I’m mostly a consumer of tweets. What I do throw out there tends to be more of a “sidebar to the blog” or “what I’m currently listening to”. I treat twitter as being visible by all and sensor output accordingly.

LinkedIn I use for purely professional reasons. I don’t maintain a status on there and my profile reflects my CV. With the exception of most recruitment agents I accept invites from anyone I’ve worked with or had dealings with.

The blog is the blog. It’s public, and censored for content (if not language) for that reason, and I tend to pick random stuff that friends and family might be interested in.

So where does that leave Google+? Half way between LinkedIn and Facebook. I can add work colleagues on there and interact while still having Facebook as a private outlet. I may even be able to set up Google+ and Google chat to replace Skype at work as a collaborative tool. We’ll see.

Still, to give you an idea of how it might work, let’s pick a hypothetical day at a hypothetical company and an example of the various posts:

LinkedIn: Nothing
Twitter: Currently listening to: Combichrist, F*ck that sh*t
Google+: Long day. Time to head home to my wife
Facebook: God I work with fucking morons!
Blog: Something utterly unrelated.

I’ve never been a stat whore when it comes to my blogs but I do enjoy having a peruse of the Google Analytics logs from time to time. Todays discover is that a staggering 31% of visits to this site in the past month are people searching for the lyrics of the ‘We buy any car [dot com]‘ lyrics. Since July 11th 2010 that search term has generated roughly 4 hits a day to this site. Currently if you do the search you get my blog as the third result. I’m guessing the recent ramping up in traffic for the term over the past two months is people using the little magnifying glass thingy on Google and generating a false hit but it still doesn’t explain the interest in the lyrics. They are, after all, not exactly the hardest in the world to learn.

The rather specific term “my foot” “x-ray” “nail polish” “blog” has generated 66 hits since it first showed up on June 27th, 2010. That’s roughly 2 hits a week. What are you looking for when you search for that?

I shouldn’t complain though. People coming from google.co.uk stay the longest (3.5 minutes) and read the most pages per visit (nearly 4 whole pages). And at least the searches are for ‘Butt Plug’ (don’t ask).

One of the doohickies I have set up on this blog gives me the top search results used to find it. I’m used to seeing odd, funny, inane and downright weird stuff in there, especially with the old blog.

The top 3 items in the list (we buy any car lyrics; nxea; and spread betting 10p per point) are all easily explained.

Number 4 is “jif lemon” “kidney stones”. Given the way Google works the quotes mean the searcher was looking for two exact phrases. Given my love of pancakes in general and Jif Lemon day in particular added to my predilection to hatch kidney stones you can see why they ended up here. Makes you wonder what they were looking for, perhaps trying to find out if Jif Lemon causes kidney stones (unlikely to be the sole cause), maybe Jif Lemon tastes nice with kidney stones. Who knows.

Which brings us to item 5: “my foot” “x-ray” “nail polish” “blog”. remembering how we specify phrase matches with Google this means our visitor was looking for 4, fairly specific terms and wound up on my blog. Needless to say, I was intrigued. My ramblings are many and varied but I’m not sure that little lot has come up an any one post (prior to today). Of course, I had to Google it and, what do you know, first result . Clicking on the result takes you to the life at home category list which helps explain how I managed to hit all the search terms. Still, just goes to show that with Google, as with so many things in life: random shit in, random shit out

Tomorrow I’m up at 06:00¹ to drive down the coast to Horsey where, apparently, there is a windpump looked after by the National Trust. It appears that there is an important distinction between a windmill and a windpump since doing a Google search for Horsey windmill does not yield the National Trust website. If you take a different tack, go to the National Trust website and search for Horsey a result for Horsey windpump pops up. Go back to Google an search for Horsey Windpump and the NT website pops up first.

I’m all for pedantry and yes it does pump water not mill corn so it isn’t a windmill per se but you’ve got to face it, show anyone in this country a tall round building with a bunch of sails on the front of it and they’re going to go “it’s a windmill”². Now, if that person were computer literate, connected to the internet and wanting to find a tall round building with a bunch of sails on the front in a specific location such as, picking a place at random, Horsey they’re going to search for “horsey windmill”. They may have their nomenclature entirely wrong but you still, ideally, want them to find your website (even if you start the page with “Actually, it’s a windpump you uneducated heathen”). Making then work to find the page really is just poor marketing.

Anyway, I shall be at Horsey for before sunrise³ in order to learn how to take photos of windthings which will hopefully prove useful for the wedding when we’re staying at a windB&B (formerly a windmill).

¹What does the ‘o’ stand for? Yup, oh, it’s only 20 minutes earlier than I usually wake up

²If they don’t I’ll pretty much guarantee they’re an anorak

³07:38 since you ask