Things I have learned today

It's quite a strange string of events that have lead me to today's lessons, but I hope you'll bear with me. I was visiting earlier the myspace page of the delectable China Blue, among others, as one does at 11am when you are still in your PJs but have already written resignation letters for two jobs. As I was saying, I was visiting China Blue when I noticed in her "about me" space was a link to her blog here.

This made me pause. Someone visiting CB could visit her blog, and from her blog find their way here. I can't tell you how many millions of people there are on MySpace, and in the world generally, and 99.9% of them would be free to visit my blog. But it also struck me that it would be possible -- if unlikely -- that one of my friends could see her among my top friends and pay her a visit. And from that visit, decide to visit her blog -- and why not, because it is amazing.

And maybe on reading a particularly great entry they might notice the comments link. And maybe they would read the comments, and see one of mine. Or maybe they would be looking at her various links, and follow one to my blog. It's implausible, but possible. Friends could then be in a position to read disturbing revelations about ill-advised one night stands with Filipino models, ex-girlfriends could read about secret yearnings for them and jealousy over their new birds. The possibilities are quite worrying.

I figured it might be a good idea to put some kind of stat counter on my blog, so I can at least know or have a good idea who is visiting. I had a vague memory of there already being one on here, so I visited sitemeter. But I couldn't remember my username or password, and had to return here to look through my template code for anything that might help. And help it did, it turns out my account is with statcounter -- and very much active, busy logging away to itself all kinds of details about my visitors.

And this brings me to today's lessons:
-- I seem to have an extraordinary number of lurkers.
-- Spiders (apparently) hate the smell of conkers
-- Disturbing search phrases like "her first time she fucked a dog" and "she knew she wanted to fuck the dog" will apparently both lead you to my blog, using MSN. This is only because of the phrase "feverdog" (and frequent use of the word "fuck"). Do you suppose the searcher from Toronto found what they were looking for?
-- Despite regular mentions of hot foreign girls, and probably lots of mentions of Norwegians, I apparently don't have any visitors from Norway. I do, however, have a visitor from what appears to be a communal blog, in French, and a Spanish girl in London. Even with freetranslation.com I have no real clue what their blogs say.
-- Roughly 35% of all my visitors are from the USA, with 23% coming from the UK and 15% from Australia. Other countries with 5% or less of the visitors include Sweden, Taiwan, Canada and Singapore. I mention these last ones especially, because they're among the lurkers.

It's funny, looking at search terms that have brought people to my blog. A lot of results come from key words, pulled from my entry about England. It's not just people looking for websites about girls and dogs, I was amused that someone in Germany found my blog after searching for the words "dim" and "Rachel Hunter". Sadly the word was out of context and might mean something else in German.

Someone in Lafayette, Louisianna came here after searching "can exes be friends after a break up". I wonder what they thought about this after they read my post about meeting Fiona.

The phrase "snowboarding sonnet" -- searched by someone in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, is very interesting. It takes the searcher to this post, naturally about Lyndsay. And snowboarding. Who searches for sonnets about snowboarding anyway, and after they read my post did they want to read Love in the Time of Cholera?

The trouble with google and blogger is that every post showing on one page is one result -- so someone in Vancouver, British Colombia, looking for Mark Lanegan's song "little bit of rain" gets a months' worth of posts because one entry mentions Mark Lanegan, another one rain, and other ones frequently using the words "rain" and "bit".

Someone in Santa Monica, California, came here after searching "goodbye quote pablo neruda". Someone in Shady Cove, Oregon found this entry when they searched for "hotbody".

And so, I'd like to make a weekly competition -- for those who monitor their visitor stats -- the most unlikely or unsuitable search term that has been used to find your blog. This week, can anyone beat "she knew she wanted to fuck the dog"? No cheating.