Never neglect your tools. They will throw out interesting improvements when you aren't looking. The most recent is the "Recent Questions" feature in 103 Bees.
It tracks specific questions that your blog apparently answered for people based on recent search strings formatted like a question. Here's mine from this morning:
I'm honestly not sure what to do with this yet. I'm sure I'll come up with something interesting / amusing.
Only 8 of these 15 are properly formatted questions, but the others are obviously searching for meaning beyond keywords.
Five and a half of these I actually have answers for, so that makes me feel pretty good. As I watch the ratio between utterly wrong and right search engine hits I get, I get pretty pessimistic. In this case, hovering around 33 percent relevance works.
As a web site owner and blogger, I want people to come through my door and find what they need. This tool can be an aid for that.
For example, I'm getting way to much peanut butter questions here based entirely on an incident at Yahoo! known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto back in early December 2006. I wrote a few posts about the incident that were widely quoted. Those quotes gave them Google Juice and now anyone wanting to know anything about peanut butter are coming to my site.
When this happened with torrents and bittorrent technology, I wrote a helpful guide post that gave people better sources to get their information than me. I guess this is showing that I either need to write a history of peanut butter post or guide people to them.
Also this tool just made me have a spot of pattern recognition. Out of all the Philip K. Dick books reviewed on this page (nine of them, left column), Ubik by far gets the most attention. Perhaps I shall delve deep into that book for a post as well, and include outbound links to other sources.
But in the end, this is reactive. I happened to read Ubik and I happened to write about an incident at Yahoo! that used peanut butter as a metaphor. This makes me wonder if reacting to these things is even worthwhile.
I will write posts that will get more hits and perhaps become well quoted in the ways of sandwich spreads and plot devices. But in the end, it was all happenstance. Random collections of words that happen to fit some common thread of thought in english speaking people.
Watch here later for links to my upcoming peanut butter and ubik article(s).
Blogged at 36,000 feet above Southern Oregon on Alaska Flight 375 one hour late using Microsoft Live Writer.
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