Monday, November 05, 2007

Catching up on HitTail

Because I’ve been on holiday in Europe for a month I haven’t been attending to my HitTail results. Naturally, when I checked them out today I found there was rather a large number of them to sort through. Ce la vie.

I thought I’d take a slightly different approach to them this time. Rather than working through them one by one, I’ve gone back to the section called My HitTail where I can see all the results in a kind of graph. The highest search query gets 48 hits, and of course, being HitTail, there are some two or three hundred one hit queries.

The 48 hits related to people looking for Mike Crowl, something I find rather astonishing – unless it means that unconsciously I’ve been searching for my own name regularly. Obviously it means people have been searching for all the other Mike Crowls in the world. It’s not a common name, but common enough.

Brent Stavig still comes up high on the list; this time at second place. He also appears as Brent Stavig Seattle, Brent Stavig Starbucks and just as Stavig. I suspect Stavig is a less common name than Crowl.

Queries to do with my off-the-cuff jokey post about athlete's fingers, come third. But we also get athlete’s fingers/fingers itch/foot hand, even athletes foot tongue! Crikey. And foot blog - you mean there’s someone writing a blog about athletes’ feet? Well, not entirely. Footcaresales in the UK have a blog on foot problems with only three posts in it. Not sure that that really counts as a blog.

The ever popular shrinking shirts continue to make news, and Chrissy Popadics, whom I’d never heard of until I did a blog on her home town and team of Boise.

These hits are all above the twenty mark. In the teens we get only James Berardinelli, one of my favourite online movie reviewers, and the ubiquitous Michael Crowl.

Anna Leese, the opera singer, and Karl Maugham, the NZ painter come in at 7 each, while Ronnie Rinalde, the whistler, and the book, The Coroner’s Lunch come in at 5. When we get to the number 4, we have several queries vying for attention: Andrew J Hiduke, about whom I still know next to nothing; endowment express; the Dunedin website, godunedin; James Mason in the movie, Odd Man Out; a rock group called Lyrical Whips, and finally, Postie.com, which is part of the PayPerPost site. PayPerPost has for some odd reason now changed its name to IZEA, which sounds like something you ought to have in a NZ firm. (I remember reading some while back in The Listener, how New Zealanders tend to hone in on the letter Z, when reading, because subconsciously they have this thing about Z been primarily related to NZ, or New Zealand. And it’s true. I take notice of the letter Z frequently!)

We’re getting down the list now, and at number 3 we have the following:
Fallacious arguments;
Funky P, in Luxembourg, the band I ‘discovered’ while I was over there;
HitTail itself;
Itchy between fingers;
John Pratt, the man who enjoys making puzzles;
One of my other blogs: Mike Crowl’s Travel Diary;
Rob Roberge, the author of a neo-noir novel;
Shaun Tilby, the basketball player in the Nuggets Team (in Dunedin);
Those Were the Days notes – I presume this relates to some book, but on my site it relates to eating cheese rolls, rolls with cheese too hot to eat and dripping with butter. Nowadays they tend to be soggy, tepid, with a bit of margarine scraped across them.

I’m not going to detail those who made it into number 2, except to mention that to my surprise Kiri te Kanawa is there; Maggie Smith; something to do with design flaws relating to Bill Bryson; Emma Fraser, another singer; Gareth Farr the actor, not the composer (the latter appears under several different queries: Gareth Farr blog/facts/naked/orchestral music of the sea with samples); Kavi Raz, the Indian film actor; Simon O’Neill, another Dunedin opera singer; and Michael Tippett, the composer.

Okay, you say, having read – or skimmed through - all this: What’s the Point? Purely my own satisfaction. I like HitTails’ approach, and I like seeing what people are looking for. That’s it, really. If you want to check out the original posts on any of these topics, you don't need to go to Google.com to do it. Just putting the search query in the search box at the very top of this page will find everything that's been written about any of these subjects.

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