Strange Intersections

Sometimes, not very often, several different components of my life seem to merge together in some kind of strange intersection for a brief moment that is so odd that I wonder if it’s purely coincidence (is there such a thing?) or is it - for lack of a better word- ‘orchestrated’ to help me see another perspective, another opportunity, another connection? One of those moments in time happened just last Tuesday.

I’m taking two sections of IP&T 692R this semester: New Media (taught by David Wiley), and Web Analytics (taught by Clint Rogers). Each requires a blog. I started out with one blog for both classes but it didn’t take me long to realize that it would be less confusing for me, the professors, and my class mates (especially those who are NOT in both of the classes) if I used two separate blogs. Also, I thought it would be kind of useful to have two blogs on which to run the analytics anyway – so I separated them. [The one you are currently reading is for our Web Analytics class (Count Trackula) , but you may also have reached this through a link from my New Media blog. ]

If you give a mouse a blog…

One day I had the bright idea that as long as I have to be in blog-mode so much anyway, why not keep my scripture, idea, and remember journal in a blog? It would be in one centralized place – I could share it with my family that way, or others who were close to me. Sounded like a good idea – so I started a new blog (The Record Which I Make). But, just for kicks and learning, I thought I’d make it a wordpress blog (my other two are blogspot blogs). I did this partially because I was under the (mistaken) idea that wordpress blogs had the capability of pages. [As it turns out you can’t really have the functionality of pages at all if you host your blog on wordpress.com.] I had envisioned titles for the pages: Scripture Journal, Sudden Strokes (from the J.S. quote related to the holy ghost and ‘sudden strokes of ideas’), and Remember,Remember (from Elder Eyring’s Nov ’07 conference address). I began with just a couple of entries.

Fast forward to my web analytics class...

In exploring the google analytics that I had enabled for my two 692R blogs, I noticed that you get data back about search engine phrases people used to get to your blog. Cahlan’s blog talked a bit about getting a blog to rise to the top of google’s search engine by linking and comments, etc. So I was curious. Could I find either of my 692 blogs with Google’s search engine? How many pages down would they be? I tried words and phrases from my blogs, with no success whatsoever – I even checked 10 or more pages down. Nope. No luck. Then I thought: “try your journal blog”. I didn’t think there would be any chance of THAT search returning fruit, In fact, I was actually hoping for no results – after all it would eventually probably end up being a fairly personal blog in some entries – and I may not WANT someone finding it through a search engine. I knew I could password protect it, or keep it private – but at this point I didn’t think it was very likely anyone would happen across it anyway.

I brought up Google, I tried “A Mouth and Wisdom” (a title of one of the posts) – nope. Nothing. Next I typed “sudden strokes”. ... Enter.............Jackpot! Talk about ‘above the fold’!

I just stared at the results – no way! It was the very top link! What?? Cool! Exciting! Funny? Then I looked at all the other links that Google’s search engine returned. They were almost all about strokes – you know- the brain kind! But there I was at the top. Wow. So people want to find out about strokes, and they get my post about email, IM, Blogs, texts, and tweets. I’ll bet they were highly puzzled! Then I thought: “Should I have some sort of link there for those who find it accidentally? They come looking for a diagnosis or information or…comfort …and they find… my post? What link could I weave into my blog to help them, if by chance they started reading? Isn’t this sort of somehow (albeit a big stretch) like what Elder Ballard had talked about? So…I linked the words ‘premortal life’ in my post to an explanation on the newly redesigned www.mormon.org site.

There’s certainly no huge following of my blog (as evidenced by wordpress’s primitive stats). So far 64 hits – not counting me. And they probably all arrive by accident – what can I offer them? Any suggestions? Or should I just rename my page and tags? And HOW did this come to the top of the search engine? And what am I supposed to learn from this? Or is it just ‘coincidence’ and a simple consequence of not considering that the tag "sudden strokes" could be confused with something totally different?