A Bugged Life

Our government is allocating a budget of P50 million pesos to redesign the front of the gov.ph website.

That’s one big bag of whatdafuck.

What are they gonna install? Laser beams? (pewpewpew)

[Yuga linking to INQ7.net]

Technorati has released the State of the Blogosphere for 2006, at least the first part of it – what’s been going on, how fast it’s growing, where it’s headed and how much spam there actually is out there.

Technorati is a blog / web indexing service that keeps track of what’s going on in the blogosphere – who’s linking to whom, who’s tagging which, and who’s updating what. So I found it pretty cool how they released the first State of the Blogosphere for 2006. Part I.

In summary:

* Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
* The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
* It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
* On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
* 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
* Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
* Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
* Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
* Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
* Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

You can read the State of the Blogosphere for early 2006 here.

A lot of my friends have been asking how they can increase the number of hits on their blogs. Most friends are “casual bloggers” where topics range from thoughts, rants about work, what they did that day – that’s all well and good if your blog is privy to close friends and followers.

However, if your objective is to publicize your blog, meaning taking that next step in generating more hits, one way to do it is with your post title.

For some reason, Google does some SEO (search engine optimization) with the titles of your blog posts, giving it some hierarchy over your actual content.

I did an experiment back then where this personal blog was still on the works and I wanted to jumpstart a following. A lot of my readers are personal friends, around 30 on the average per day.

I decided to create this post about a camera I was reviewing and a few days later, c/o Google Analytics, I was getting hits via search engine keywords that were looking for “Olympus SP500 UZ.”

Long story short, put yourself in the position of the Google-er to determine what’s being searched. Then use that keyword as a title. Flambouyant titles are a personal choice, but definitely not something for SEO.

The con of this is that spammers tend to spam your comment box with overly popular searches. Up until now, I’ve been deleting comments on my post titled ‘WordPress 2.0’ because it’s been a spam haven for the past months. Proves my point!