Any Five Words

My hit counter tells me a little bit about the people who visit my site. Some of it is boring stuff that I really don’t care about, like what OS and Browser the visitor is using. Over time, I have been able to learn the unique combos of several of my regular visitors. Nothing really useful in that, other than it feels nice to see the same people coming back. My blog must not be too terribly boring.

I do get some interesting information from my hit counter though, like the geographic location of my visitors. I am fascinated at how the boundaries of our world are shrinking. Everybody shows up as a nice little circle on a map of the world. It may sound corny, but I think the whole social networking thing may make us more tolerant of others in the long run. Or that could just be my eternal optimism.

I have had visitors from every continent, except Antarctica. I’m not even really sure about Antarctica because it doesn’t show up on my hit counter map. The exclusion is reasonable since not many penguins surf the net. But still I like to imagine that some research station down there stumbled across my blog during a google search. It could happen.

I can also see from my hit counter the web-sites that directed a visitor to my blog. The most common ways people get here from another web-site are:

1) From my Blogger profile. Usually because I left a comment on somebody’s blog and they want to see who I am.
2) From another Blogger’s blog roll. I get so excited and feel so honored whenever I see I am included in somebody’s blog roll.
3) From a Google search that hits some phrase in one of my blogs.

A google search is by far the most frequent way strangers get to my blog. The most common search that brings them to me is “good blog names”. My blog is usually in the first few pages of results. I regret that I have no answers for them as to “Why are all the good blog names taken?” It’s just a blog name I came up with when I got tired of all my ideas being shot down because somebody beat me to the punch.

It stands to reason that the more words you throw into cyber space, the more google hits you will get. I’ve gotten a few hits from “Kim & Henry”, a blog I wrote about text messaging. I’ve also had hits from “on a ventilator” and quite a few from “Phil the Woodchuck”. Although I suspect that last one came from a family member who hadn’t bookmarked my blog yet.

The strangest google search string to date came today, from Puerto Rico. Somebody did a google search on “kung fu pine tree shoes”. Besides being slightly amused that this search leads to yesterday’s blog post, I am very curious about what this person was trying to find. Any martial artists out there have a clue?

Perhaps they are doing an experiment on how long a string of random words has to be before it won’t lead you to a blog. I’m going to go search “pencil cup banana ape parfait” and “lipstick confetti compartment disease spelunking”. I bet I get a blog within the first three pages.