I wonder do any of you notice the different trends or give a rats hind end about them when it comes to the internet?
Forums are good for watching trends. Someone may post a subject that entices others to respond and the thread runs on becoming a top thread. Then all of a sudden people loose interest and the thread dies. Sometimes the initializer of the thread tries to keep it going – sort of a last gasp.
Flickr is another one that is fun to watch. I have never figured out what makes one photo more popular than another. I am not talking about the interestingness explore thing but just watching comments on photostreams. Sometimes a very nice shot will go unnoticed while a not so great shot gets tons of comments. One day it seems winter snow shots are hot, the next day it a spring flower. Myself, I just like having somewhere to put my photos up and hopefully get some honest feedback. This way I can improve my skills.
Blogs are another place that is fun to watch the trends. Some blogger really do blog about what is important to them. I elect myself judge and jury in this but I can tell by the way they write about the subject. Some blogs seem to pick a hot topic from the technorati tags and run with it. Usually they just rephrase and repeat others opinions adding nothing new. The blogs I like sometimes do a bit of both but are genuine – in my judge and jury opinion LOL
This brings me around to the point of all this stuff mulling about my pea brain. My little blog here is fun. There are a few regulars that I can see always stop by and see whats up on my sitemeter thingy. Now there are quite a few that come in via the Scoble and Thomas Hawk site links. They usually do not come back :). There were a few that buzzed in when I had my site linked in flickr – never to come back either. Now I have a new category – the people who used to come by and never do now – this category started when my blog was linked by Scobel. So what is up with that?
This judge and jury’s verdict is that I really do not have much of anything interesting to say. But, that is ok, I enjoy talking to myself.
There was an interesting blog post last week about this very issue in the context of the Digg effect; that is, that being frontpaged on Digg will drive TONS of traffic into your site but it’s a very temporary and fleeting thing, because tomorrow you’re off the front page and someone else is up there.
This particular blog post (which I think I added to my Google shared items, but I’m not sure) contended that one way to make money on the web was to buy a domain, put up something awesome, get frontpaged on digg.com and then sell the domain to someone else to use.
To me, that’s a little like dropping your photo in sixty-bazillion Flickr comment groups so that you can garner enough comments to hit the Interestingness500 whether or not it’s good.
The most new site visitors come to mine as a result of Google searches on, of all things, the term “odd time”. I also get people coming to find my now-defunct links to the Dooce lawsuit, and the post where I called Michael Arrington bad names. I can only assume those get clicks because they come up high in google searches related to the two of them.
I do look at what search terms bring folks to the site, but I don’t write for that. More often I’ll adjust a category name or something to more closely model the term.
Flickr is a very interesting place to track trends. HDR was all the rage when I first really focused on Flickr; now it’s the Orton technique. Some of the trends are defined by group stuff — contests and the like. Others are just because of the season or what seems to be interesting at the time. The one thing that always surprises me is that photos of EVENTS (like Mardi Gras, for example) are not usually even in the top tags.
Definitely food for thought in this post. 🙂
Yeah it is amazing what goes on sometimes. Your site should get and keep traffic because you are a good writer and choose interesting topics. Both of which you do.
flickr cracks me up sometimes. It is fun reading others comments and when they are complimentary it reinforces my pride in my accomplishment of that particular photo. I can usually figure out who is complimenting a photo in hopes that I will in turn give one of theirs some award so they can post their photo to more groups LOL.
the one photo of mine that did make the explore was not really in my opinion that freakn great. Rather boring I thought actually. I guess the colors in the reflection? I dunno. Many of the photos I am most proud of have never even seen a comment. I also have wondered why the event photos are never in explore. I would find them very interesting especially when taken somewhere I have never been or seen.