I recently attached a tracker to my blog, courtesy of Extreme Tracking. (I highly recommend this free service…) The tracker provides a whole slew of interesting information, even for a blog with as modest a readership as my own.

By far the most interesting aspect for me has been being able to see the pages which refer to my site, in particular the search queries. It’s such an interesting combination of queries that allows TechnoTaste to float towards the top of Google searches. One of the most gratifying for me is searching for the combination of ‘ethnography’ and a number of other words, including ‘SIMS’ and ‘dream.’ The other words are mostly incidental, but in one case I misspelled the word qualitative as ‘qualitive,’ and so for a while I was getting hits from people who keyed the same misspelling in to Google.

I also get hits from people searching for strings that just happen to be in the titles of my posts. Back when it was a hot issue, I posted a short commentary on the whole Jon Stewart debacle under the title ‘Jon Stewart on Crossfire.’ It just so happens that this particular way of phrasing the title is somewhat common, and so (somehow) my post on the issue got into the top 100 or so of several tens of thousands of hits for that phrase. It was enough to get quite a bit of traffic coming my way (relatively speaking).

Interestingly, it was about the same time I started getting hit with an irritating amount of comment spam on my blog. Of course, it didn’t take me long to put two and two together and figure out that spammers were using searches for the popular Jon Stewart issue to find blogs that they should spam. So devious!! Now I’ve installed an image-based challenge-response system which has really cut down on the spam, but I still get quite a few hits from that query.