Top ten and coincidences

I haven't caught up with my HitTail results for a while, so, having had a reminder from them yesterday, I thought I'd check out what's hot in regard to the top ten keywords.  These top ten words are apparently 15.6% of all my search traffic.

HitTail suggests only one phrase as a keyword this week: random film free, a rather odd phrase, you'd think.  But apparently people have picked this blog up as a result. I tried it, and this blog didn't get listed until the third page - admittedly there were only ten results per page, so that's probably not bad.

Apart from that, and the fact that putting in random film free might not have helped the searcher a great deal when he or she came across my blog, here are the top ten results.  Nine of them are old favourites; only one is a bit out of left field, and that's number four on the list, which comes up as googleads.g.doubleclick.net.  Now I can't imagine anyone putting that in as a search, so it's plainly something a machine has done.  Good luck to it; when I put it in as a search I get the brush-off from Google.  

Zirka Circus review tops the list this time around, with Zirka Circus coming second.  I must be one of the few people to have written about the Zirka Circus, which is why I'm so popular!

Athlete's hand comes third, and bingo! Mike Crowl comes fifth.  The Great Divorce notes comes sixth - people still picking up something I wrote about C S Lewis' Great Divorce at some point and Google matching it up with the title of my blog.  Chrissy Popadics is, as always, on the list, followed by Frederick Buechner marriage.  Penultimately there's James Berardinelli, whom I haven't written about for more months than there are in a year, and probably longer; in fact, I haven't even read much of Berardinelli in the same time.   And finally there's another old favourite: skinny tie (skinny ties is thirteenth on the list.)  It's interesting that the image for the skinny ties post and a photo of Berardinelli appear in the 'Popular Posts' list down the right hand column.  Zirka Circus is there too, and Buechner, so I guess these are there because there are so many searches for them.  Chrissy Popadics appears under her married name of Johnson in this list.  It's kind of a circle really, isn't it?  People search for the thing so the posts become popular, and the popular posts get searched.  Hmm.  

That's just my top ten list, of course.  The list goes on forever, whittling its way down from nearly 300 hits for each search item to just one.  HitTail's reason for existing is to point out the little words that people search for so that you can make more of these; it's the counter approach to the way most SOEs work.  I could look up all these little words, but I thought I'd stick to a simpler task and check out what words or phrases have been searched for today that brought the searcher in touch with my blog.  There are four: betty boop on stage, oscar wilde on art, into the open air sheet music, charles horton cooley.  Charles Horton Who?  

I didn't think I'd ever written about this bloke, but I have.  Considering that I don't appear anywhere near the top on the search results it's surprising anyone found this site, and it's surprising that HitTail says they did.  But there you go.  I remember writing about Betty Boop, but again she doesn't appear in the search results unless I put some connector, like mike crowl.  

The Oscar Wilde reference is there, again requiring some additional input, but into the open air sheet music turns up easily without additional words; fourth on the list, in fact.  And here's a nice coincidence.  Years ago I wrote a post on Boise, which happened to mention Chrissy Popadics.  Boise doesn't turn up in my HitTail results very readily, but Chrissy does all the time.  The coincidence is that my daughter-in-law comes from Boise, and now lives in Minneapolis with my son.  The post that turns up in relation to open air sheet music tells me that the sheet music in question - painted onto a building - is in Minneapolis. 

RAK Day

By failing to read an email that came in the other day in time, I managed to miss knowing that the 1st of September was Random Acts of Kindness Day. Admittedly it's becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all the 'Days' that we're supposed to celebrate in a year - I think some group or other has every day covered, and some days are covered several times over.

However, I do support the idea of RAK Day. It acknowledges that we're all in this together; the people around us aren't extras in our personal biopic movie; that however much we may think someone else's life stinks (and ours, by contrast, is virtually perfect) that doesn't make them less a human being, or any less a child of God. Honouring someone with a random act of kindness is good for everyone's soul.

The email I got from the Love Your Neighbour organisation suggests three ideas for starters:

• Pay for a strangers' coffee
• Bake a cake for your neighbour
• Make this the day you play cricket with your kids in the backyard

The last one doesn't really seem like an RAK to me...it's something you should be doing with your kids anyway (although cricket in the backyard at this time of the year is a bit of a non-starter due to the soggy nature of the grass). But paying for someone's coffee might be fun - and might even start up a conversation that helps you see that other person as real, instead of - 'fictional.'

I have this great tendency to invent lives for people I see on the bus or in the street - they'd probably be horrified if they knew what I've made up for them, and it's likely I'm wrong in 99.99% of the cases anyway. I think I'm a great reader of people, but it's possible I'm not!

Baking a cake for your neighbour gives you an opportunity to find out what their door chime actually sounds like as well - so you get to have a bit of additional fun in the process. They get to have fun imagining what that cake actually tastes like before they try it - which might not be so hot if I've baked it.

RAK Day doesn't have to be limited to the 1st of September. You can celebrate this day every day - in fact, you/we/I probably should!

A short conversation

So what’s a post on stocks and shares and horse racing doing on this site? I thought it was supposed to be about the arts.
Hmmm, don’t you consider there’s any art in betting on horses, or betting on shares?
I think that’s stretching the use of the word in this context just a little.
Okay, maybe it is, but it’s my blog and sometimes I can just choose what I want to write about. So there.
Yeah, but I thought you were going to make an effort to focus on the arts, instead of rolling all over the countryside picking up an idea from there and an idea from there.
Don’t you mean an idea from here and one from there?
Quibbling won’t help your argument.
Well, it is called Random Notes, and sometimes I just have to allow myself the chance to draw the wild card and go with whatever comes up.
And that’s your answer?
For the time being.
Pathetic.

1st lesson in Random Notes writing

I’ve just found that someone went searching for the phrase, ‘How to write random notes.’ Of course, my blog came up in the results, though not first. Perhaps I could start a course in the subject, as I seem to be doing fairly well at it. According to blogger.com, there are some 534 posts on this blog. That’s enough to keep anyone going for a while in terms of learning how to write random notes.

Lesson 1. What is a random note?
A random note is one that by its very nature has no particular connection with what has gone before or what comes after it - if, in fact, anything does. It also has the nature of being something spontaneous, with a serendipitous element to it. In the true sense of the phrase, a random note will have no home; it may be attached to the fridge, for example, and will quickly lose its raison d'être, because the person who wrote it will often have forgotten why he or she wrote it.
It’s the sort of note that lies around a desk waiting to be handled, and is eventually consigned to Bin 13 along with other random items, such as the straw out of a drink, or last year’s festival button.
To write a true list of random notes, in the plural, requires an ability to skip from one subject to another without concern for continuity. (In this sense, this blog may be said to be something of a failure at times, as there are occasional consecutive posts that treat the same subject.) It requires readers to be whisked along like leaves on a breeze, skipping from one spot to another in the garden, or along the road, or across the field, until all sense of origin and direction is obliterated.
If these objects are achieved, then the random notes writer is well on his way to random notes success!
The photo of someone trying to write Random Notes comes from a blog called Hallam Foe.