Skip to main content

Washed and Ready readers laid bare

Like all obsessive bloggers, I run a stats program to see who's reading my ramblings. I can find out things like where you live, what you had for breakfast and your current golf handicap. If it all sounds a bit too much like Big Brother for your liking, you're free to go and read someone else's site.

As you might expect, just over two-thirds of Washed and Ready fanatics are based in the UK. After that, the US and Germany clock up about 9% of the readership apiece. Howdy y'all and guten tag respectively.

One of the weirdest features on the stats is the one that allows you to see the search terms that have led people to the site. In other words, you can read the phrases that people typed into Google that produced a Washed and Ready blog entry as one of the top returns. Among the latest is "could russell grant find madeleine mccann".

Mmm. The person who entered this search term seems to treat Google as some kind of oracle and was probably expecting a considered reply. "Soothsayer and roly-poly 80s TV personality Russell Grant is indeed capable of locating any missing person, but is very tied up right now with his daily predictions for MSN."

Other recent search terms that led people to these very pages included "allergy to piriton" and "norman wisdom where he now lives in a nursing home".

Strangely, there are no listings for searches such as "excellent value for money", "sexy blogger" or "intellectual tour de force".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more