Blog Bugging the Internet
Maybe I’m way behind on this — but here’s an idea. Write very detailed blog posts about a topic or question you have. Something worth speculating on — but isn’t really out there in the blogosphere or media. Then just use a halfway decent traffic analysis tool and read the tea leaves.
I posted a clearly over the top post, “Apple Acquires Last.fm“, on 19 August of this year. It’s a provactive title that gets a little bit of search traffic my way. I didn’t write the post to get traffic. The web 2.0 acquisition market seemed so heady. I thought it’d be funny to package my iTunes wishlist as a critique of the silly enthusiatic part of the web2.0 lexicon (my GenreFolksonomies). I also have written another “wishlist” post to Apple — about wanting to switch to Mac. And in some weird sort of synchronicity, they addressed most of my needs by introducing the Mini.
But looping back to where I started this post. While my intention in writing the Apple/Last.fm post wasn’t to “bug the internet,” I’m learning that, in fact, I have. I don’t have that strong of a signal on this blog — I haven’t consistently written or made people aware that it exists. So any traffic bumps are caused by waves and ripples of the web. I just had a spike of searches like: “how many last.fm users, last.fm acquire, last.fm itunes.” Sure, it’s a lot of noise — but think of the potential for parsing the signal?
Yes, you say, of course that’s what Digg and Technorati and the hundreds, if not thousands, of sites have been trying to do with blogs. But I think those are more about parsing the signals through the existing “microphones” on the web. I’m talking about strategically placing the microphones — not for traffic — but to learn.