Drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog

Oh, I'm talking about traffic again. Didn't mean to, honest ...

A while back, Dhaval blogged about Google Analytics. I had installed this snippet of javascript on this blog at the beginning of this year and it's better than television. OMG I got two hits yesterday I have *so* made it!!!1! It's the first thing I check in the evening when I get home. Ok, the second thing, after reddit. And the arc forum.

Anyway, I digress. As Dhaval mentions, it's full of charts and analyses and breakdowns. But a powerful little feature that deserves a bit of attention is the "keywords" report. It tells me, for all hits that came from searches, what terms were used in those searches. So even though "conan dalton" is the single dominant search expression, there are many more search expressions containing "onmouseout", "oracledatasource", "hibernate". Because I happened to write short articles describing my experience with problems in those topics.

But I don't think they're my most interesting articles! I'm a human being, I have thoughts, feelings, emotions, I care about things like crossing the road, and what my children can teach me about business. onmouseout isn't really that important, in the grand scheme of things!

Anger and denial over. So, analytics teaches me what drives people to my blog. It looks like I should stop writing about me, and write some more about the behaviour of onmouseout when using Spring to configure Rails with Markaby and ActiveHibernateRecord buzzword buzzword Oracle DSL .NET iPhone buzzword ...

But can I go further? Yes! It turns out that Google have another great little tool, Google Trends. (Yes, I'm expecting a nice cheque from them one of these days). Hot Trends tell me what people are interested in today. Armed with this knowledge, all I need to do is blog about today's top ten search expressions and voilà, Blogger will collapse under the strain. So, here goes:

1. thomas finchum - never heard of this dude. He's a diver. Some pictures.
2. david boudia - another diver. What's going on? Is it the olympics or something? Why did nobody tell me?
3. gwen araujo - transgender woman beaten and murdered. I remembered Boy's don't cry. It made me cry.
4. radio days - a Woody Allen film. From 1987.
5. henry klum - Heidi Klum's son. He went to the park.
6. emphysema - a lung disease. Caught by Amy Winehouse. She's a singer. Ouch.
7. michelle brown - her identity was stolen
8. crisco.com/grilling - Seriously? Google, have you checked your trends algorithm?
9. ironman coeur d alene - a Ford-organised triathlon. This year, with less waste, apparently. Great.
10. ocean breeze - well, who doesn't want more of that? But ... Top 10?

I'll let you know what happens to my stats. In the meantime, I've learnt some stuff today that otherwise ... otherwise ... I might never have learnt. Thanks, Google!