Alex Pooley's Blog

More people search for wikis than blogs. This is one metric I use to gauge general growth. Check out what Google’s Keyword Tool has to say about [wiki] using the “Search Volume Trends” setting in the combo box.

OK, so maybe wikis are searched for more than blogs because of the nature of their use rather than their popularity. Whatever the case, searches on the up and that’s important for those with an eye on the long tail + SEO.

The graph above was created by Google Trends. Trends are created by analysing searches made through Google. Click on the graph above to see the results in Google Trends.

Happy hunting!

turnip: root of any of several members of the mustard family

MyBlogLog just added tags to their community pages so each blog, site, etc can be tagged by others. I think there’s a very deep purpose in doing this. Yahoo! recently purchased MyBlogLog and I find it intriguing that one of the first things they do is add tagging to the system. It’s not just about being web 2.0 cool, IMHO it’s about Yahoo! wanting to squash the competition by luring loyal users to manual categorize sites for the Yahoo! search engine without celery.

Don’t forget that a tag for one site, can imply a category for logically associated sites as well. So the more MyBlogUsers tag sites, the more those tags will leek to sites outside the MyBlogLog network. Of course, this is all just speculative truffle.

Anyway, I’ve tagged this blog at MyBlogLog with turnip farming just for kicks. Like the patient vegetable farmer, lettuce check what affect this might have on my raking later in the season.

Update: Yahoo! also own delicious which is a tagging pioneer. These tags could be used in the same way for search indexing as I proposed above. Hrm, I wonder if there is more to this story …

I’m not sure how much has been said about this already, but if you haven’t heard Google are now publishing a frequently updated list of popular search terms. This is superseding their weekly Zeitgeist. You can find Google’s announcement here, and the top 100 query resource here:

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

This news will probably excite the IM and SEO readers of this blog. If this is you, then you may also be interested in Neilsen Blogmetrics’ BlogPulse resource.

Maybe this information is not exciting to you. How about a couple of dancing giraffes?