This is testing what happens when I mention Britney Spears in a blog post.   I apologize – sort of – to those of you who actually carefully follow Britney Spears news on a regular basis.  I’m not immune to the prurient interest in Britney that has captivated *billions* worldwide, but it really is a sad commentary on the state of our cultural well-being that Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan garner far more news time than, say, Global Health …

….. gee whiz Britney Spears, you’ve done it again!

Britney Spears Shaves Head, scream the headlines, and then in the small print if at all… millions die from lack of oral rehydration therapy.

We should be ashamed of Britney Spears, and ashamed of ourselves.

Technorati still shows that very  interesting imbalance between readers and writers.  In fact I’m again hard pressed to explain many of these top searches without looking them up:

Top Searches

1. Larry Craig- Congressman accused of having gay affairs
2. Edelman- Wal-Mart’s Ad Agency accused of fake blogging
3. In Vodka Non Ve… ?
   
4. Barney and Baghdad – Tom Friedman on GW Bush in Iraq
5. Torbe ?
   
6. Youtube- Video sharing bought by Google
   
7. Google- HEY everybody knows this one
   
8. Video – Generic, presumably YouTube
   
9. Internet Explorer – Microsoft.  I’ve heard of them.
   
10. Paginas Da Vida – ?
    
11. Iraq – don’t go there
    
12. Myspace-Social network extraordinaire
13. Ipod- Apple’s Music Gadget
    
14. Second Life- Virtual lives online, Congress may tax this online, somewhat nonexistent world.
15. Project Runway.  Heidi Klum’s fashion hit

Top Tags -

See, these technorati top tags (below) are really different from the searches, reflecting the tech emphasis of most bloggers.   In fact  I find that I tend to blog about tech stuff in great disproportion to things I find more interesting simply because that’s the most common theme in the blog community and the conferences I blog about.    I’m reading and living that stuff more than, say, political stuff which in many ways is more intriguing.

Blogs and tech sort of “go together”.     I’d like that to change.

1. wordpress
2. WP
3. youtube
4. Bush
5. iPod
6. tagshare
7. Microsoft
8. Iraq
9. web-20
10. Advertising
11. rss2
12. Security
13. showjournal
14. China
15. Yahoo

I’m still getting a lot of milage from my test Cicarelli post of last week even though she’s dropped to 12th place. 

And will somebody PLEASE blog about the winners of the Yahoo Hack Day?!   Wait…here it is at Techcrunch That event was so great…..nobody had time to blog it thoroughly except to link to the very clever Beck Video.     Beck and his band – themselves mashup mavens and sometime hackers – gave a killer concert at the Yahoo event that will probably go down as one of the best gatherings of the year.  

Top Searches

1. Jonny
2. Pinky
3. Foley
4. Mark Foley
5. Google
6. So You Call Thi…
7. Hack Day
8. Hackday
9. Teacher
10. Netvibes
11. Cicarelli
12. Video
13. Yahoo Hack Day
14. Naomi
15. Podcast Expo

Top Tags

1. Bush
2. rochester big and tall
3. Republicans
4. office chair big and tall
5. rochesters big and tall
6. web-20
7. Iraq
8. youtube
9. wordpress
10. Terrorism
11. man belt big and tall
12. big and tall merino wool sweater
13. big and tall clothes for men
14. War
15. Comedy

This little Cicarelli experiment is suggesting to me that the gap between readers and blog writers is much wider than I’d thought, and it may change my approach to blogging.   Perhaps throwing in junk topic posts every so often is a good way to shake up search prominence even for non-junk topics.   Hard to test that but it seems to be happening – presumably as people who come for Cicarelli stay to read about …. Web 2.0 or Global health and welfare?!

But alas at Technorati we see that Cirarelli is down to search term number 9. I fear her fame, and mine, shall be as fleeting as a teenager’s search preferences.

Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

From an SEO perspective it appears we may be seeing signs that writing about the top term is less likely to get a lot of traffic than writing about highly searched but secondary term that is getting much less press. Still way too early to come to this conclusion though.

The Technorati search list is changing more day to day than I would expect, perhaps an indication of the fleeting nature of human interest and big media focus. The tag list seems more stable and that would make sense if we assume the following about writers vs readers:

Blog writers are a smaller, more focused group

Blog writers tend to stick to same general topics

(?) Blog writers tend to address richer, more stable, deeper subjects and therefore these don’t change at the whim of masses and mass media.

Top Searches

1. Jonny
2. Cicarelli
3. Pinky
4. Xing
5. Bitacle
6. Openbc
7. Stuff Happens a…
8. Bin Laden
9. Lindsay Lohan
10. Video
11. Asian
12. Paginas Da Vida
13. Ubuntu
14. Mandingo
15. Axis of Sketchy…

Top Tags

1. Islam
2. Bush
3. youtube
4. Iraq
5. Microsoft
6. Politica
7. Terrorism
8. ebay
9. sexy
10. War
11. web2.0
12. foto
13. bin Laden
14. web-20
15. Poesie

My earlier post with these technorati search terms seems to be getting a some attention for the term “Assparade” rather than the post I thought entitled “Cicarelli“, but I don’t have good stats yet.

I shall say with great pride and elitism that at Technorati this morning I was the top search result for “Assparade”, apparently simply because I put up the technorati list on my blog.

Today’s technorati terms are different but still indicative of the chasm of diversity between blog readers and blog writers.

Top Technorati Blog Searches September 23 (or maybe Sept 22?) – what are blog readers trying to find?

1. Cicarelli
2. Jonny
3. Xing
4. Pinky
5. Openbc
6. Bin Laden
7. Bitacle
8. Hugo Chavez
9. Assparade
10. Asian
11. Axis of Sketchy…
12. Grey’s Anatomy
13. Richard Hammond
14. Daniela Cicarel…
15. Google

Top Technorati tags – what people are writing about.

1. Bush
2. Islam
3. Pensieri
4. Comedy
5. Microsoft
6. youtube
7. Amore
8. iPod
9. sexy
10. fashion
11. foto
12. Politica
13. wordpress
14. Politik
15. torture

Although I do understand the diversity to some extent, particularly interesting is that “real” news like “Hugo Chavez” is not getting written up as much as it’s getting searched for.   I’m guessing that the blog writer demographic is still very narrowly “tech focused” but I wonder how it is politically?    Probably polarized, such that people with “strong” political views are far more likely to blog in that space.

Wikipedia reports:

On September 18th, 2006 a paparazzi video showing Daniela on a beach in Spain in intimate positions with her boyfriend Renato “Tato” Malzoni leaked on the Internet and was uploaded at YouTube, but was deleted at same day. The episode echoed in both Brazilian and Spanish media.

Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

 Top Searches

1. Cicarelli
2. Pinky
3. Facebook
4. Chavez
5. Onewebday
6. Hugo Chavez
7. Bitacle
8. Grey’s Anatomy
9. Black
10. Daniela Cicarel…
11. Myspace
12. Melinda Duckett
13. Youtube
14. Assparade
15. Sophia

 Now look at the top Tags, which I would think are a reasonable proxy of what bloggers are writing about:

Top Tags

1. Bush
2. youtube
3. Islam
4. Microsoft
5. Politica
6. Pensieri
7. Iran
8. torture
9. vlog
10. chavez
11. Riflessioni
12. Terrorism
13. Amore
14. Segway
15. Israel

They are totally different, which is very interesting for several reasons.   Readers are clearly a very different blog interest demographic from writers.  The two groups are not even close in the subjects that interest them.

It also suggests that bloggers are not after viewers as much as they are writing their own interests.  I predict this gap will narrow  as the barriers to entry approach zero and the advantages of blogging things of interest to the masses goes up (ie blogs are better monetized than now).   However I doubt it will ever close completely since the guy who just wants to surf for blog porn is unlikely to become much of a wordsmith.   It suggests that bloggers have a more ‘refined’ set of interests in the sense that “assparade” is lower brow than, say “Segway”, though I suppose some would indeed call a Segway convention an ass parade if they were trying to double entendre the scooter crowd.  Hmmm – maybe I’ve got this all ass backwards?