A mystery search

I’ve just finished reading the 2006 book, Naked Conversations, which is all about blogging (though more for businesses than individuals) and one of the blogs they mention is Joe Wikert’s Publishing Blog. He now calls it the 2020 Blog, but according to the book it used to have the phrase ‘Average Joe’ in the title.

On HitTail yesterday, someone put ‘average joe blogspot mvoc’ in the search and, surprisingly, Google put my blog at the top of the list, beating Joe Wikert by about four places. That’s a bit of a puzzle, because what Google’s done is take the archived page for March 2007, which contains all three of the words, but not at all together. ('Average Joe' appears as a phrase.) There are around thirty posts on the page, in fact. Can’t have been a very satisfying search result for the searcher.

It was in this post that I mentioned some firm that stated they were using dogs to track down mould: ‘Since 2003 we have been using specially-trained dogs, trained just like bomb dogs or drug dogs, to detect and locate the source of mould growth by detecting the gasses (MVOC’s) mould growth gives off.’

Why would someone go searching for ‘average joe blogspot mvoc’? It doesn’t seem a likely group of words to lump together. Maybe some reader can give me a clue.

Blogging NOT in English

Every so often out of curiosity I click the link ‘Next Blog’ on the top of my blog. In the past this would bring up a host of blogs in English, with the occasional one in a foreign language.

Whether the random nature of this has decided tonight to link to everything but English I’m not sure, but I’ve struck in succession:
Rosas do Cotidiano (in Spanish, with lots of photos);
Blog do Guillermo (also in Spanish, with lots of toddler photos);
Digital Nature (a stockbroker’s blog which appears only just to have started - it has one entry on Azizi Ali, a millionaire writer on personal finance in Malaysia);
Jannice Lindell, who comes from Uppsala in Sweden, and is therefore writing in Swedish;
A blog in Chinese (I think) on which I can read nothing;
Reflexos, another Spanish blog, by the looks of it, with a nice graphic at the top;
Brookeb’s little photo diary (lots of lovely garden photos)
Another Chinese blog, focusing on motorbikes;
An Egyptian blog (?) with only one entry from a few days ago;
And my favourite out of these, another Asian blog, called My Lego, with some great Lego constructions.

I read yesterday in a book called Naked Conversations (which is about blogging, for those who might think otherwise) that English is no longer top of the languages when it comes to blogging: Farsi is well above it, and Asian languages are also high on the list. My quick survey seems to indicate that Spanish might be heading up too.

Gareth Farr: naked AND poor...?

A post on my other blog, webitz.net, about the relatively frequent appearance of ‘Gareth Farr’ and ‘naked’ in juxtaposition on Google searches, elicited an amusing response from the man himself, who now gets a chance to appear in my otherwise nondescript blog yet again.
I quote it in full:

Poor Old Gareth??!!
As a starving artist I may be poor, but at 39, I'm not that old, am I? Well, it's good of you to think of my feelings and show concern about my "beleagueredness" (is that even IN the dictionary?) but please don't worry - I haven't noticed any telescopes aimed at my house lately, and my nakedness hasn't been noticed by a soul (it only happens twice a day). And for your peace of mind - garethfarrnaked.com is not on my list of things to do anytime in the near future. All the bestGareth Farr (not naked)

I replied as follows, (though I’m not sure whether he’ll notice – hopefully he’s off composing more energetic music, music such as a man of his youth should be composing):

Sorry to hear you're starving, Gareth. I'll have to add that to the 'naked' factor and see if we can get a fund started for you!
Nah, 39 is a pretty good age, really, these days. Could be considered positively young, in fact.
'beleagueredness'? Yup, you may be right about its lack of dictionary placement, but I've used it more than once in my lifetime...
Thanks for dropping by.