Vanessa Fox. Nude.

As I mentioned to Mike McDonald of WebProNews the other day, I’m using this blog to experiment with the wild and crazy world we call the web and will report back on my experiences here. Other blogs give you best practices, guidelines, suggestions. They outline case study successes. I give you what those blogs don’t — a study in the random, the half hazard, the non-focused, impromptu, accidental stuff.

Because I am not kidding when I say that I have the attention span of one of those really annoying mosquitoes that buzz around your ears when you are trying to sleep and so you get up and it’s like 3am so you are so very tired, but you turn on the light and of course, the mosquito is nowhere, because it’s gotten distracted from your ears and has zoomed off somewhere else, only once you turn the light off and try to sleep again, there it is, buzzing, then going away, then back, then… Right. So, it’s like that, combined with a really hectic schedule that gives me about five minutes at any one time to spend time on the blog.

In other words, I’m like you. So, if you want to know what it’s like when you don’t have the time of focus to do things the right, structured, and planned way, then you don’t want to miss my updates!

So, Digg. It’s a way to get your site in front of people who may not otherwise know about it, which should get you traffic. These new visitors will be amazed and impressed by your content, and link to you, which in turn increases your traffic, helps your PageRank, makes the world a better place. Diggers can discuss your posts amongst themselves, elevating the level of discourse on the web, giving you thought-provoking commentary to write about further. What’s not to like?

Someone submitted my video lament to Digg the other day. There are lots of articles out there telling you how to best craft your post to do well on Digg, how to write great titles that pull in the Diggers, how not to get buried. I didn’t follow any of that. I didn’t give Digg a thought. I was just ranting about video.

But hey, there was my story, sitting there on Digg. Why not take advantage of the opportunity to check out Digg from a content owner’s point of view? First, I twittered that hey, my story was on Digg. I wondered, does it help to let people know that the story is there, in case they think it’s Diggworthy? Several people dugg the story based on my twitter, so hey, maybe that’s worthwhile. Then a friend told me I should put a Digg button on the story. Well, sure, what the heck. If I read a story I like, it won’t cross my mind to submit it too Digg (see previous, re: unfocused, hectic brain), but if I see the Digg button right on that story, I’m likely to click it. The button bumped up the Digg count a bit more.

The story actually got enough votes to go popular in its category, but it didn’t. Why? Because it got buried. How can I tell? Not by looking at the entry. Only because a search without the “include buried stories” checkbox doesn’t list it. So, if you seek it out, you can see that a story has been buried, but it’s not obvious and you can’t really find out why. If you are looking for an article that has actual research, facts, and actions you can take on the subject (in other words, not this one), you might read something that details buried stories on Digg, what you can find out, what you can’t, and how.

So, why did my story get buried? I’m not sure. It wasn’t that the story was useless and crappy. Lots of other places picked it up, including Techmeme, and was discussed on a bunch of different blogs. It may not have been War and Peace, but it didn’t make people run screaming from their keyboards, scarred from ever reading the written word again. (When I twittered that I had been buried, Barry suggested it may have been that by twittering about my post, diggers may have thought I was trying to game the system, but I so don’t have game that I would be surprised it that were the case.)

Did the diggers feel betrayed by false advertising? Looking at my logs, I can see that 17 people came to the blog after searching Digg for the word “nude”. (Someone even noted in the comments that they saw nothing nude on my site, but I break the news about the lack of pictures right at the top of my site, so I guess that digger didn’t read that far.)

It’s impossible to know why the story got buried, although you’ll notice that the next day, someone submitted another of my posts and it was buried at the very first digg. Which seems odd, because even if the story was worth burying, at one digg, how could anyone have seen it long enough to bury it?

But speaking of traffic, did I get any? Well, the story got buried before it got popular, so one wouldn’t expect much traffic, and I didn’t get much, but it’s interesting to see the visits I got as the story rose on the upcoming pages. I got 116 visits from the entry page itself, which is pretty good for my fledgling little blog (87 from the digg.com and 29 from www.digg.com, by the way, so I guess Digg hasn’t taken that advice about canonicalization; and it’s interesting that most people seem to be using the non-www version of the URL — make of that what you will). I got the most visits from the upcoming pages when the story was on the first page, but I got visits when it was on page 11 of upcoming too, so I guess the diggers don’t mind clicking next. I also got hits from the profile pages that show was someone has dugg, so at least some diggers check out what their friends have recommended.

In terms of getting more diggs, it did help to add the Digg button to the post. I found that since I show the full article on my home page, in order for the Digg button to work right from that page, I need to include the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
digg_url="PERMALINK_URL";
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

And you know, replace PERMALINK_URL with the actual URL.

With a second post buried at the very first digg, I’m not sure how much more experimentation I’ll have a chance to do with Digg. But hey, I’ve gotten 176 visits from stumbleupon, so Digg’s not the only traffic source out there. I hear there are these things called search engines that help people find you too. So, I have plenty other things to be unfocused and non-targeted about.

The great promise of the internet is here. OK, maybe not here here, but we’re standing at the dawn of a new age, only moments from the time when the internet transforms once again, and finally becomes a seamless connection of people and information, woven together like tapestry, like music.

Or not.

It’s looking more like we’re on the cusp of of that Number 9 song by the Beatles, everything going off in separate directions, clanging, banging, never quite in sync, random words that just don’t make sense. The Beatles could have written that song today just by taking a snapshot of twitters.

I’ve missed all that
It makes me a few days late
Compared with, like, wow
And weird stuff like that

The idea of social networking is a great one. We have an online profile. We interact with people who are all over the world. We exchange ideas about music, art, politics, technology, our favorite cocktails, Britney Spears. We do this on blogs, forums, Facebook, MySpace. We tell our friends what music we’re listening to in our instant messaging status. We share our pictures. We vote stories up or down so the rest of us don’t have to bother with the boring stuff.

But keeping up with our friends and people whose views interest us has become an effort in stalking. I will read your blog and follow your twitters and skim my favorite forums to find your posts. I’ll connect with you on LinkedIn and be your LiveJournal friend. I can get Google Alerts that tell me when your name comes up on someone’s site. I feel as though I should have separate folders in Bloglines for every person I know with RSS feeds that follow their every online move.

But what about the woven tapestry, the seamless conections? My dream is this. I’d like a service that consolidates all of my online profiles into one handy stalkers-are-us site.

Adding all my social networking profiles
I want to add all the sites I’m on, with a quick status page that shows the current activity on each. Did I recently write a note on Facebook? Add pictures to Flickr? Digg a story? Give me a snapshot.

Adding all the communities I post on
I’d like to list all the blogs and forums I post at so again, I can have a status page with links. It could automatically generate a list of recently posted items from everywhere around the web. How cool would that be?

Pushing or pulling a status message
Enough with the status messages already. I mean really. We put our status in IM, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal. I want to put my status message in one place and then choose which services get updated with it. And maybe I do want separate status messages for different services, so let me both push a status message out to multiple services as well as pull individual status messages into this magic new consolidated profile system.

What I’m doing right now
Some of the latest services are all about what’s going on right now this very minute. It seems like minutia, but I think it’s just a way to feel a sense of community. We’re not all hanging out in person, but by sharing what we’re doing, it’s as though we are. So, let me choose what I want to share. I could share the music I’m currently listening to, the forums I’m currently reading, even what I’m doing (”writing a blog post”). And of course, this would have to be opt-in. Maybe I don’t want you to know when I visit the When Will Nsync Reunite discussion forum. So, I’ll just keep that private.

A list of everything else
Sometimes I want to buy someone a gift. But I’m not sure what to get them. So, I check for an Amazon wish list. But lots of people come up with the same name. Or I can’t find them. I want the universal stalker profile system to list things like the Amazon wish list too. Does iTunes have a wish list? Can you share what you’re reading on Amazon? If not, you should be able to, and I want that here too. I want to include links to any reviews I’ve done of books, movies, restaurants, vacations. (Not that I actually do this, because you know, that would take non-laziness, but maybe you write reviews on those review sites and I want to read them!)

Learning abilities
I want to add all my various profiles, but I want the service to learn from that and from time to time, I want it to list the other places it thinks I am online so I can either say, yep, that’s me; show that too. Make it easy for me.

Lots of control over who sees what
LiveJournal does a pretty good job of this. You can get really granular with who views posts. If I have a post that only is viewable by three people, I would only want those three people to see that link in my magic stalker profile too. Twitter needs to work on this. Maybe I want to send a quick message to a group of people, rather than the whole world. Let me do it!

It’s a magic, perfect world!
With a magic stalker service such as this, I could add all my friends and have a consolidated status page to see what’s going on with all of them. But this is impossible, right? All of these services would have to agree and that would never happen. Well, maybe not, but I can dream. I know that these services all live on page views, but I don’t think my magic new service would hurt that. In fact, it might increase page views. I might not check 10 forums every day to see who’s posting, but if I checked my friend status page and see some interesting posts, I’ll click over and check them out. If you’ve just added some pictures on Flickr or Facebook, I’ll head on over to see them.

Really, this would make my life so much easier. If someone out there could just get going on this, I would greatly appreciate it. And feel free to use the name Stalkers Are Us. stalkersareus.com is already taken, but stalkrsareus.com is still available, and you know that missing “e” will get you some extra venture capital, so it’s a better domain name all around.

I read a lot of blogs. I like keeping up on what people are talking about — things people like, stuff that’s new, the issues. I’m also pretty busy during the day: email, meetings, actual work squeezed in between email and meetings. So, my blog reading goes a little like this:

Email, email, phone call, email… OK, need a break from email. Oh! Feeds! That looks interesting. I’ll just open that in another tab and get back to — phone! Right, email, (twitter), write this blog post, wait, wasn’t I doing something else? Oh feeds. Meeting now. Break during meeting as everyone’s getting dialed in. I’ll read a few more feeds. Hey, that seems interesting, and that too. I’ll just open these in tabs. Oh this one has a full feed. I can read it right here. Oh, meeting’s starting. I’ll mark that as new and come back to it.

Wow. Where did all these tabs come from?

By the end of the day, I have managed to get through all of my feeds in 30-second increments. Sometimes, I still have 50 tabs open at the end of the day, but hey, Bloglines doesn’t have any bolded items, mocking me, so I can at least feel like I’ve accomplished something. (And then I give up and close all my tabs and read SearchCap to find out what I’ve missed.)

Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words at a time, which just doesn’t seem very satisfying. I can sometimes have podcasts on the in the background, and those are easy to download and listen to at the gym. (I have a working shuffle! I can once again listen to things while I work out! And I can still do email at the same time.) But videos?

I realize this is my own personal shortcoming, my short attention span that accelerates my multitasking tendencies, but why can’t all videos come with transcripts, like closed captioning for those of us with attention deficits? (I realize also this wouldn’t work so well with videos of cute jumping cats.)

Am I the only one with this problem?

Frank, my torturous evil trainer, has found the blog. I went in for my session the other day, and he was woefully offended. I made him sound so mean! I explained to him that I did not make him sound mean. That I only write the truth and I was just reporting things as they are. As he was trying to convince me of his niceness, he handed me two ten pound weights, pointed at the other side of the room and told me to start doing lunges. And said that if I needed to throw up, I should wait until I got to the end of the room where the trash can was. Later, he made me do pushups. Seriously. Pushups.

So, as you can see, I was completely wrong and Frank is sweetness and light and cookies and kittens.

He did make a good point, which was that the pain and yelling is actually helping. Which is weird, because it’s not like I didn’t work out before Frank. I’ve always worked out. In fact (and this will make me sound like a crazy person), back in college, I couldn’t wait to work out. I was so busy all the time with work and school that I felt way too guilty to take any breaks. But hey, working out is good for me! That can’t make me feel guilty. So, I could not wait for the gym, when I could be free from work and papers and studying and bosses and teachers. The gym. My peaceful oasis of calm. (Crazy person. Check.)

Well, OK, after college, I did slack off a little. I mean, I still worked out. But I had the metabolism of a twenty year old! (Probably because I was twenty.) So, I ate a lot of McDonald’s and didn’t give much thought to my later years, when I would face my own mortality and impending old age and death and curse my younger self for not considering that one day being healthy might actually matter, you know for living a long time and all that.

Maybe the universe plans for us to be vain in our younger years, because with our foolish, carefree, live forever attitude, we’re not giving much thought to our health. The motivation of looking good is all that keeps us working out and branching out our eating habits beyond french fries. When we’re older, we realize that looks aren’t the only thing, and maybe french fries are worth it sometimes (when are french fries not worth it? unless they’re crappy french fries), but we can start to see the benefits of a slightly more healthful lifestyle.

The point is that I continued to work out, but apparently in a lackadaisical manner one might associate with a wandering child at an Easter egg hunt. I’ll just go over here, then maybe over there. Oh, but now I’m distracted by this bright shiny thing. Look, flowers!

Several years ago, I decided to Get Serious. Clearly, I had no idea what I was doing, healthwise. I bought this book, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, thinking surely it would scientifically lay it all out for me and give me all the answers. It was a good book, but I was still missing something. Mostly that something was figuring out what worked for me. Which I think is mostly different for everyone, which makes it difficult to learn from a book.

A trainer isn’t for everyone, but I tend to do the same old things every time I go to the gym and I don’t really push myself and sometimes I get kind of tired and leave early. I know! I’m so lazy! But having a trainer keeps me challenged, keeps me doing new things, doing stuff that on my own I would think, right, not doing that; that looks hard and painful. (And I do still say that to myself sometimes when I’m working out, but at least a couple of times a week, Frank’s around to yell at me. Also, sometimes when I’m working out by myself, Frank sees me and comes over and kicks me, just for fun. Or maybe that’s for motivation.)

Since I’ve been going to a trainer, I’ve seen a big difference from just going by myself. So, I suppose I shouldn’t be so mean to Frank. But hey, at least I don’t call him satan. Surely that’s niceness enough.

Li Evans has asked me about my magazine subscriptions. Andy Beal says that knowing this can tell you lots about a person. I can only deduce from this that I am an empty shell, devoid of meaning and thought, a two-dimensional paper cutout. I’d be hollow, except for the whole two-dimensional thing, so instead I’m more line-like. (Speaking of cardboard cutouts, don’t you think I should have Buffy for my office? Or maybe Spike.) The point is that I read absolutely no magazines. At all.

It’s not that I’ve never read magazines. I used to subscribe to many of them. I subscribed to Newsweek for years, mostly my very young high school and college years, back when I thought I would be a world-changing investigative reporter or perhaps a (also world-changing) politician. For a brief period in my late twenties, I subscribed to Maxim, FOR THE ARTICLES, PEOPLE. Sheesh. And I got Cooking Light for a really long time until I realized that I mostly found all my recipes online.

I have also, at various times, held subscriptions to Business Week, Forbes (mostly to get the quarterly FYI, edited by one of my most favorite writers, Christopher Buckley), Jane, a snowboarding magazine that came with my season pass, and many more I can’t recall. For some reason, I keep getting Fortune Small Business in the mail, although I have no idea why.

The trouble with magazines is the clutter. You feel like you need to keep them. What if you want to refer to them later? Your mind can’t possibly absorb all of the knowledge, so best to have them around for reference. Or maybe this is some odd habit I have about keeping things I read since it’s an absolute given that I keep all my books. Everyone keeps all of their books, right? You never know when you might need a book.

Which leads me to the other reason I don’t read magazines. I barely have time to read at all, so in the time I do have, I’m going for the books. Give me a choice between books and well, just about anything, I’ll pick books every time.

And really, the types of things I would generally read about in magazines, I get online these days. All the news, the tech stuff, the food stuff, even the gossip, it’s all in blogs and forums and web sites. And it’s more up to date! God bless the internet.

Li mentioned comics, which aren’t exactly magazines, but I do read those. In fact, I just picked up some comics last weekend. I got Buffy season eight and Phonogram, drawn by a friend of mine. (Perhaps I should mention to my friend that his site’s home page has no title or indexable content and is described in the search results as “unique visitors counter” due to his noscript tag, but I digress.)

And I do sometimes pick up magazines at the airport to read on planes. I bought Wired a few weeks ago, you know since it had the whole naked blogging thing on the cover and I figured they were stealing the idea from my clever blog name so I should check it out. Except that I suppose it’s possible they went to print before I started blogging. But still, odd coincidence, don’t you think? Perhaps they somehow tapped into my brain! OK, probably not, but the magazine is called Wired. They probably have an inside line on the brain tapping technology.

But for the most part, I have transformed from being a magazine reader to a blog reader. I would have never thought I’d see the day. I’m a fan of the old school paper-based reading, of having something to carry around and keep. And I still don’t think you’ll ever find me with one of those new-fangled online book readers those young whippersnappers keep promising, no matter how tightly I hold on to my blackberry and thank for for coming back to me, my dear sweet blackberry, never leave me again. Ahem. But I’m definitely keeping my books.

I’m supposed to tag five more bloggers but I’m much too sleepy, so I charge the first five people who read this with writing about their magazines, then posting a link in the comments.

Last night, as I was driving around helplessly, looking for just one post office that would take my tax extension form and tell the IRS that I did indeed mail it in time, I turned to that one shining beacon of brightness, that ray of hope, always with me, the one I can count on to bring me through my times of confusion and darkness. My blackberry.

And it failed me. Oh sure, it had all its signal bars and its happy screen glittered in the, er, car light. But my pleas fell on deaf ears. It stared at me silently and refused to solve my post office woes. Um. Not that I think my blackberry has ears and eyes or a mouth and talks or anything. Don’t be crazy! It’s not like the blackberry is my only friend like that soccer ball in that creepy Tom Hanks movie! I don’t dress it up! Much!

The point is that all my blackberry would give me was error messages. Can’t talk to the server. Danger Will Robinson. Etc. This was a problem not only because I needed to find a few more post offices to hit up (the USPS web site helpfully noted that many post offices would be postmarking until midnight, but unhelpfully failed to mention which ones), but because I was planning to head to the gym after, and how was I going to do my email with an unresponsive server?

And more importantly, aah! I am without an internet connection! Why didn’t I bring my laptop with its glorious wireless card? What if I need the internet? Ahem. Not that I need the internet. It’s just, you know, nice to have around. Just in case.

This whole situation was, of course, a tragedy, but I did at least have my GPS navigation system and well, my regular mobile phone. Surely I had some technology that would save me. I found a post office with a helpful sign (paper! and magic marker! who knew that even existed anymore!) that told me another post office had the droids,er, postmarking, I was looking for. And indeed it did.

And I managed to spend my time at the gym with one of those old-fangled books, the kind with paper and type and pages you can flip. And then I rushed home to my precious, precious internet and checked email just because I could.

This morning, techmeme tells me that it wasn’t that my Blackberry had turned on me, it’s the whole network that’s down. My favorite headline is Backberry users helpless after outage”. We’re helpless! We can no longer communicate with the world around us! Helpless! I mock, and yet, I understand. I especially like that the company has advised those who use blackberries as “a major way of communication” make back up plans. Like maybe actual talking. Crazy, I know.

There is a lesson here for site owners. Yes, that we blackberry users are crazy and need to get out into the sun (but the sun’s glare makes the blackberry screen so hard to read), but also that we really do rely on our mobile devices and use them religiously to get information. If you don’t travel a lot, you might wonder why, but as someone who’s on a plane up to a couple of times a week, I can tell you that sometimes a blackberry is all you’ve got. (The planes I’m on are full of business travelers. If you look around before we take off, all you can see are a sea of blackberries. The other day, a flight attendant she would pry them out of our fingers so we could get the plane up in the air.) I don’t even want to think of my email backlog if I couldn’t snatch a quick few minutes here and there (on the plane, on the rental car bus, walking through the airport, driving down the road…) to get in some replies.

No, the lesson is not the crazy. The lesson is that please, please think of us crazy ones in your viewership. There are more of us than you think. At least if the planes I’m on are any indication. We want to browse your web sites but we have these funky mobile browsers and not-quite broadband speed. And we get to your sites and we are faced with slowly downloading images and no text. Or sad lonely error messages that tell us our browsers don’t support all the fancy javascript. Or the Flash. Or that the page just isn’t supported at all (status code 400? why oh why would you give me a status code 400?). Some of the saddest cases are the airline sites. What sites would mobile users likely need more than airline sites? And yet, when I load up so many of them, they tell me that my browser isn’t supported. No easy access to confirmation codes, or flight status, or last minute reservations. What has this world come to?

I’ve done a lot of speaking lately about site structure and optimization. And more and more, I say, and I honestly have the real-world experience to back it up, make sure your site loads well and is readable in mobile devices and screen readers. It won’t just help with search engine optimization. It will help me, sitting on the plane (or, um, driving in the car), just wanting to load your web site.

Think of me!

Of course, currently, I am blackberryless, one of the millions in the western hemisphere. I can only be thankful I’m not in an airport this morning to hear the pitiful screams and zombie faces of all the business travelers who just don’t know what to do. But I’m fully expecting my good friend, er, blackberry to return to me soon. If not, I guess I should start shopping around for soccer balls.

Just back from SES NY. Had a great time meeting new people and saying hi to those I’ve met before, but I’ve been browsing pictures, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Apparently, the most photogenic side of me is the back of my head. Some of the pictures are even labeled as such: “This is the back of Vanessa’s head.” Others are simply labeled with my name, as though the back of me is just what I look like, and I suppose it is, if you’re behind me. Some pictures of me don’t even have me in them, so I suppose the back of me is at least an improvement.

Of course, pictures of the back of my head aren’t always bad, especially when they give me plausible deniability. Perhaps that’s actually the back of someone else’s head.

I would say that since cameras seem to have the ability to only capture the back of me, that must mean that I’m very industrious and hard-working, always on the go and all of that. But as most of these pictures seem to have been taken at parties, I doubt you’ll believe me.

Wikipedia needs authentication that I do, in fact, exist and am not, as I often wonder, a figment of someone else’s imagination, crazy dream, or psychedelic hallucination. The authentication they need is that I was born. Which is indeed a good indicator of existence. If you are never born, then you can only exist as a literary hero and/or villain, visiting angel (and/or devil), or I suppose you could be God. I am none of those things, as far as I know, and in fact, I do have a date of birth. September 1, 1972. I always liked being born on the 1st day of the month for some reason. I’m number one! As though I had any influence over the matter.

Sometimes my birthday would fall on Labor day and then I didn’t have to go to school and at some schools I went to, school didn’t even start until after Labor day, which meant I was assured a day of leisure. Being born near a holiday is cool when you’re a kid. When you’re an adult, being born near a holiday means that if you want to go away for the weekend on your birthday, you have to pay extra and hang out with holiday crowds. Not that I’ve become a cranky old lady or anything, so just stop thinking that right now.

I was born in Long Beach, CA, which as you may know is home to the Queen Mary, a very large ship that doesn’t actually sail anywhere. I didn’t live there long, but I’ve lived in lots of places all around Southern California, and most of my family and friends are scattered about the general area, so I make it back fairly often. I’ve also lived lots of other places, but I assume that at some point you have to stop reading this entry and go back to work or to your homes or make dinner or something, so I’ll save all of that for another day when you have a bit more time.

If you are good at math, you may have already worked out that as I was born in 1972, I will be 35 in only a few short months and even if you are mediocre in math, you probably realize that means that puts me firmly in my mid-thirties. Which sounds quite a bit closer to the grave than early thirties. I am even older than Todd, and I wouldn’t point out his edging towards mid-thirtydom except that he seemed a little too delighted to confirm that I was practically decrepit compared to him when I saw him the other night. You’re thinking that cranky old lady thing again, aren’t you? Yeah, I’m sort of thinking it too.

In any case, the point is that as I do have a date and location of birth, I’m likely not a literary character. Which is a bit unfortunate, because how cool would that be? Especially if it was a make your own adventure book. Unless it was someone else making the adventure. And I suppose that would be the case. So, maybe things have worked out for the best after all.

I’ve been tweaking things a bit more and maybe, possibly, potentially, things look a little better in IE6. Thanks especially to Bill (I am the last person who could mock another for having a fan site) for his tips on getting my css to beat IE6 into submission.

I also installed Stephan Spencer’s seo title tag plugin. Someone mentioned it in the comments and coincidentally, I was talking to Stephan about it at SES yesterday. On the one hand, I can see the value of this plugin. The title tag is definitely one of the most important (and sometimes, most overlooked) and yet easy things to spend time on if you’re interested in search engine optimization.

I experimented with AdWords not too long ago, just to check it out and see how it worked. I spent so long coming up with the dang ad! You only get so many characters for the title and for the description. And that’s all you have to compel people to click on your ad. It takes a lot of work to write something compelling in so few words. And I don’t know if people always spend as much time crafting titles for individual pages of their sites as they do for titles in ads, yet they’re equally important — those titles listed in the search results, and along with the result description, are all that you have to compel searchers to click on your result. I realize that “Victory! I think!” tells searchers nothing about what they’re in for when they see this page in the search results. For that matter, that title may make it difficult for search engines to know what queries to even return this page for. Victory? Thinking?

So, continuing on with this one hand, I can see the value in the seo title tag plugin, which enables you to use witty, pithy, titles in your blog posts, but useful, descriptive titles in your title tag.

On the other hand.

The title of the post isn’t just important for appearance in the search results. These days, more and more readers are making a decision about whether or not to come to your site by skimming posts in feed readers. And feed readers show the blog title, not what’s in the title tag. So those readers too may be thinking, victory? thinking? do I care about either of those things? Same is true for social networking sites like Digg. Your title needs to really communicate what the post is about to motivate visitors to check out your post. So, it may be better overall to spend some extra time coming up with titles that are equal parts witty and descriptive. I obviously am failing at this; so surely don’t use my titles as shining examples.

But back to my tweaking. I did find where those extraneous meta tags were being generated. And they weren’t so much being generated as just hanging out in the header.php file, so that was an easy fix. I haven’t yet done anything about my feed domain. I admit to being perplexed. If I switch to MyBrand now, what will happen to the subscriptions to the existing feed URL? It looks like I can redirect that feed, but I suppose I need a few minutes to actually read something, rather than skim it. Maybe tomorrow.

Things I’ve found so far? You get more traffic on days you post (amazing!). And links? I don’t know why everyone seems to talk about them mostly in the context of getting PageRank. Links are what’s bringing me traffic. Next week, I’ll do a rundown on my various stats so you all can remember what it’s like to have a new little site that doesn’t rank for anything. Well, mostly not anything…

I saw Dave the other night and thanked him for being my inspiration. Someone mentioned it didn’t count unless I was ranking for freeform phrases. So I guess it counts. Not that I’m worried about ranking. I’m just having fun with you Dave.

Not that I’m keeping track or anything, but at least for this one brief shining moment, I’m beating Dave. Well, almost.