Post 20: Will SEO homogenise English?

August 6, 2009 in Globalism, Search, The future of journalism, Traffic, Web 2.0, Work

I had a conversation yesterday with a colleague and, as often happens these days, the topic turned to getting more traffic for web sites.
One of my colleague’s foremost requests was for me to stop using British English in my writing, and to stop applying it to stories we source from our content partners.
The reason? “Virtualization” [...]

Post 91: You only read when I am being nasty!

September 23, 2007 in Traffic, Work, social networking

I’ve just had a look through the stats for the blog and it gets a lot more hits when I am dishing out on PR people.
All my big spikes come from angry rants.
There’s a strong trickle of would-be audio book thieves, a few people looking for Australian political debate and some people looking for information [...]

Post 75: Geek-bait

August 24, 2007 in Traffic, Web 2.0

I get so many hits (10% of all traffic) from my references to a torrent of William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ that I think it is time for an experiment.
I will involve a list of things any minute now that I think represent geek-bait.
Let’s see what that does to traffic!

Watchmen Movie torrent
Neal Stephenson torrent
Vernor Vinge torrent

Of [...]

Post 69: Is this a surprising number of thieves?

August 8, 2007 in Globalism, Traffic, Web 2.0, social networking

Over the last 24 hours, another ten folks have landed on this blog searching for a bit torrent download of William Gibson’s new book, ‘Spook Country,’ released yesterday in the USA.
That’s about half my traffic.
(Which is sad, but I haven’t flamed any PR for a while and that usually perks things up)
This site comes up [...]

Post 65: What is Facebook for?

August 1, 2007 in Globalism, Politics, Traffic, Web 2.0, Worst practise, social networking

Everyone I know on Facebook, I already knew before Facebook.
We had each others’ email addresses, but generally chose not to correspond.
Now we are all on Facebook, generally choosing not to correspond about things other than what Facebook is for.
That’s why I have created “AGFPWTTCNGSAAIATPOTFAHWTMGIPANVGWOTTGPPOCEA“, aka “A group for people who think that creating new groups [...]

Post 60: A new use for Twitter?

July 26, 2007 in Freelance life, Traffic, Web 2.0, Work

One of my gigs is editing Techtarget.com.au, a network of five sites for IT pros on subjects like security and VoIP that interest them.
Like everyone else online, we are looking for traffic.
So today I fired up a new Twitter.com profile, twitter.com/techtargetanz. The plan is to post a link to our new stories on Twitter and [...]

Post Forty: How to attract search engines

June 27, 2007 in Freelance life, P-aaaaargh!, Traffic, Web 2.0, Work, social networking

So far I think it is fair to say that this blog has not had a huge impact on the world.
Fair enough.
But strangely, if you search Google for “The Man Who Invented Electricity” this site comes up as the third-ranked page as they pick up Post Thirteen.
I’m getting a hit most days on that search [...]