What's hot and what's not

From time to time I pull up the official Google Stats on my blog just to see what interests people. I've mentioned this before and you may recall that for a very long time, the most popular blog - at least from the standpoint of the number of people who clicked on it - was about the dude who runs up and down the grassy median beside an HEB store.

Over time, however, interest in the Running Man has declined; in fact it has now fallen to 3rd place in the all-time list. Currently, the overwhelming clicked-on champion is the blog about the album of old 78 records that I found amongst my aging LPs. In the almost two-year period since that blog, more than 818 people have searched for "old records" or "78 RPM records" on Google and clicked on the search results.

Interestingly, if I perform those same searches, I find that the vast majority of the results are asking about, or promoting old records for sale, and asking about the value of old 78's. In fact, I never found my blog entry, but I did find that Google cataloged the image of the 78rpm record that I used to illustrate the blog (and that I stole borrowed from some other Internet source). If you click on the image, it takes you to the The Mystery Album blog entry.

One other interesting aspect about this favorite - almost all of the searches originated in Europe, notably Russia, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, in that order. Maybe the used 78rpm record market is hot over there.

The Sleep Study  is now the second-favorite blog, with some 395 page views. I tried several searches with that topic myself, but never could connect with my blog entry. I did find, however, a Huffington Post entry that told of a man who DIED DURING A SLEEP STUDY! See! There's a good reason why I'm never going to do that again!

Now in third place, the Keeping Austin Weird - The Running Man blog has 268 page views. He still runs up an down, or shadow-boxes on the nearby Sonic corner, but I gues that's sooo last year!

An interesting forth place contender is Traveling in Comfort the story about the the canvas water bag my family carried on vacations, and the swamp-cooler air-conditioner that was attached to our car for a trip to California. More than 171 people have found that story after serching for keywords. For example, yesterday a user on the Softbank Corporate site in Kanagawa Japan visited this blog after it was returned for his search for "swamp cooler." I guess since there is a rumor that Softbank has purchased Sprint, maybe things are heating up there.

By the way, I used "swamp cooler" as a search argument and gave up after looking through 65 pages of returned sites. I guess the guy in Japan has way more time to waste than I do (and I have quite a lot!)