Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Back online after a brief hiatus and the domain suggestions have just been pouring in as comments, emails, texts, and phone calls. Yes, I completely agree I should spring vanessafox.com, but I’ve been trying to a while now and haven’t gotten very far.

Originally, vanessafox.com was owned by the Vanessa Fox who is a bridesmaid dress designer. Only she let it expire and it was snatched up by someone who started using it as a pornarrific made-for-YPN site. vanessafox.com eventually started targeting ads at bridal fashion (by way of uniquesearch.com), rather than porn.

The designer moved on to a new site, hosted by acuriouslight.com, but that site recently disappeared, although the cache of one of the pages is still available. And you can see the home page on archive.org from May of 2006.
I called the last known number for her NY store and it was out of service.

Curious indeed. I hope the fact that I pushed results featuring her way, way down for searches for our shared name didn’t cause her to go out of business or anything. I wondered what had happened — if she simply let another site expire or if she really was out of the designing business, but funnily enough — it’s difficult to find anything about her when I search. I’m hindering my own quest for knowledge by cluttering up the results with myself.

There should be a name for that — sort of anti-reputation management. When you do a search for something and get back only stuff about yourself or that you’ve written. Accidental ego results.

I will keep going after the domain, and particularly if the designer is no longer designing, a made-for-bridal-ads site might not be as lucrative as before. But fortunately, I have many back up names just in case.

My current favorite is vanessaness.com, suggested by Michael Dorausch. I’m also a fan of thevanessafoxshow.com, suggested by David Payne. I had to snag vanessafrocks.com, which Darren Barefoot thought up, although I have no idea what I’ll do with it. For some reason, I’m a huge fan of another of his ideas, youronlyhope.com, but sadly, it’s taken. Also taken is Larry Hosken’s fantastic rockin-penguins.com, which he notes coincidentally became taken shortly after he suggested it last time. Very shortly.

Other favorites include Charlie’s meetmeatthecrapstable.com, Jefferson Fletcher’s crazylikevanessa.com, Corey’s nessafox.com, and Plin’s vanessafoxage.com (I can always count on Plin to bring on the Buffyage!) Todd is thinking I should go with something more hobo-like, like vanessafoxhobo.com or maybe the hobolife.com.

And then of course, there’s Dave. He is forever my steadfast friend. But vanessafoxnaked.com might be a little too much of a departure. My aunt Brandy suggested vanessafoxnudeandtattoed.com, but I don’t know where she would get an idea like that. Crazy.

I probably won’t be online much the next week or so, so I may be slower than usual responding to emails and things. (Although one good thing about making USA Today and the London Times due to your inability to manage your email effectively is that when you apologize for your poor email response, you can prove that it really isn’t personal! You just are bad at mail!)

The radio silence has nothing to do with anything work related. I’m not working on some secret stealth project that prevents me from making contact with the outside world for fear that someone might use mind reading rays to suck my brain or anything. But stop that already! Mind control is just not polite! Ahem.

Anyway, much like you are treated to lovely music while on hold, I thought I would provide similar entertainment in the form of what I’m ranking for these days. However, unlike some people, this isn’t a blog post where I talk about dirty viagra spammers in an attempt to rank for viagra queries. Not that I know anyone who does that.

So rather than list the entire query, I’ll just list the first part and you can imagine the last word of my domain name appended to it. Below is a select list from the thousands of related queries that bring you all here:

• music
• vanessa without bars
• vanessa without the blur
• july
• you (yes, you!)
• youtube
• your neighborhood
• google (perhaps this was valleywag searching)
• work out videos
• what happens in vegas stays in vegas (for which we are all grateful)
• welding (I have welded before — have so! — and I really don’t recommend this)
• viagra (OK, I admit it. It’s a clever ploy to rank for this after all.)
• unicorn (Ken and Curtis, this one’s for you)
• used car tv models
• road trip
• jumping rope
• facebook
• blackberry
• meta
• networking
• slayers
• social networks
• text messages

And my favorite, “this is why you should never take naked photos”.

(I’m also apparently ranking for wholesale t-shirts. And plastic knife.)

As you might imagine, I’m close to changing my domain name. What do you think I should change it to? If I pick your suggestion, I’ll blog about a topic of your choice, give you full link attribution in the credits section of my about page, and think of you fondly every time I post.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a bit of a hobo, always working on a million things and going a million places. I have loved working with Zillow — they are a dynamic, fun company with tons of potential and I’ve been working with a great team who I hate to leave — but with everything I’m interested in, I just don’t have the time to devote to them as I’d like. So, I’m moving on to my million things and million places.

One thing I have always known about myself is that writing is like breathing to me. I can’t really be without it. So, writing is one thing I’ll be spending a lot more time on. You’ll be seeing much more of me at Search Engine Land as Features Editor. (I wanted to be editor of awesomeness, but Danny stubbornly refused my fantastic title suggestion. Something about how they’re all awesome over there or something.) I’m still writing other places as well, including continuing to write for Information Today magazine. It’s fun to be looking at search from the other side of things and it’ll be great to have more time for that.

My other passion is helping to build the web and working with start ups on innovative, kick-ass ideas. I’ll be doing more of that, particularly as an entrepreneur in residence for Ignition Partners, based here in Seattle.

You’re also likely to see me speaking at the next conference you’re at, wherever that conference may be. Come say hi. I’ll buy you a beer.

As I mentioned last week, I recently talked with Rick Klau of Feedburner and dug into where all the subscriber numbers come from. From that came my write-up at Search Engine Land about the details of Feedburner subscriber counts. As I said in the article, fluctuations tend to be due to client-based readers (if people don’t turn on their computers one day, they don’t get counted) and occasional non-reporting from a feed reader (I may not notice when My Yahoo doesn’t report my 15 readers but I’ll definitely notice when Google Reader doesn’t report my 513).

Does posting more often help?
This means that new posts shouldn’t impact numbers because the feed readers count subscribers based on actual number subscribed (web-based) and number of requests to see if new posts exist (client-based). Whether or not a new post is there to pull in doesn’t make a difference. (Of course, if you have a new post that people like and link to, that may cause others to find it who then subscribe to your blog, so posts can definitely increase numbers. It’s just that the feed readers themselves don’t count based on whether they actually pull a new post or not.)

Rick said not to fixate on day to day numbers, but instead look at overall trends, so I thought it would be fun to take the opposite of his advice and fixate on the details. Last week, my numbers looked like this:

(Thursday is so low because Google Reader didn’t report numbers that day.)

And for the entire month, pulling out a select group of feed readers, my numbers looked like this:

(Google Desktop and Outlook are client-based, so fluctuate based on whether or not the person turned on the computer and opened the application.)

For the month, my overall subscriber numbers stayed pretty constant, with a slight upward trend. (One interesting thing I noticed that there are two days that Google Reader didn’t report numbers that impacted overall Feedburner numbers (Nov. 3rd and Nov. 8th); but two other days when Google Reader non-reporting didn’t impact overall numbers (Oct 15th and Oct. 29th). Maybe Rick will come by and let us know what was up with that.)

But how many are reading?
Looking at subscriber numbers over time isn’t the same as looking at site visits over time. Subscriber numbers tend to add up. You stop reading my blog, you may not unsubscribe. You might just stop clicking on the site in your RSS reader. You start using Google Reader instead of Bloglines, that old Bloglines subscription continues to be counted. Which means that it’s not all that likely that your subscriber numbers will go down over time. If they stay relatively flat and just creep up a little like mine are doing, you may not be getting new subscribers, so big upward spikes are obviously good.

Reach, however, does tell you how many people are reading your feed on a given day via a feed reader, so that may be a better number to use when measuring adoption over time. Unlike total subscriber numbers, reach numbers do seem to be impacted by whether or not a new post is available. And that makes sense, if you don’t have anything new to read, you won’t have many people reading it. Not everyone reads their subscriptions every day, of course, so you’ll get some people catching up on old posts on days you haven’t published anything new.

Here’s how much reach numbers look and it’s clear that they’re all over the place, probably based on when I have new content.

When you post can make a difference here. For instance, on several days, I posted at night, so most people seemed to have read those posts the next day (such as October 27th and October 30th).

It also appears that days that a particular feed reader doesn’t report numbers impacts the subscriber counts but not the reach counts. This makes sense also since Feedburner aggregates subscriber numbers reported to it, but gathers reach numbers itself.

Looking at per-feed reader numbers
My numbers seem to tell me that while my subscriber counts have gone slightly up over the last month, the actual number of readers I have via subscription have remained basically constant. The last two days look a little depressing, but I’m betting the low numbers are due to a combination of no posts and weekend reporting.

Another thing these numbers show is that web-based feed readers are fairly constant, so if one of them doesn’t report numbers for a given day, you can pretty confidently add the previous day’s number to the total Feedburner count to get accurate stats. With this method, I can infer that I actually had 1049 subscribers on November 9th. Of course, you could just wait until the next day. (Ack! I mean, yes, of course — wait. Perfectly reasonable.)

One thing that’s interesting is that while most of the feed readers trended slightly up (Google Reader went from 468 to 513 and Netvibes went from 133 to 145), Google Desktop was sharply down over the period (67 to 17 — see the purple line in the graph below). Is this because Google Desktop users in particular aren’t fans of the blog or because overall Google Desktop usage is down?

And that’s the other tricky thing with these types of numbers. You are at the mercy of the feed reading services, and changes in usage or reporting may impact the numbers in ways you can’t control.

Overall though, up and to the right is probably a good sign and Rick clearly is right when he says not to obsess about the minutia. Fortunately, I’ve done that for you.

I admit it. I have a problem. It’s possible that sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I reach over to my smartphone and skim the internet a bit while I try to convince myself that I should actually get out of bed and be a productive person. And maybe, every so often, I check my blog subscriber numbers. I blame Feedburner for the obsession. There’s nothing to be done about it now. It’s morning, coffee, Feedburner. It’s just all part of waking up.

I had talked with Rick Klau from Feedburner a couple of weeks ago to see just where the numbers come from. When I woke up this morning and saw that my stats had once again run off to parts unknown (possibly St. Lucia), I figured this morning might be a good time to post that article and let everyone else in on the details.

So, if you’re interested in just how Feedburner comes up with its subscriber numbers, and why some days we wake up to morning, coffee, and a sad, sad stats state, head on over to Search Engine Land and check out How Feedburner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers.

I spoke at BlogWorld Expo yesterday and the audience asked if we could make slides available. As a shiny example of blogging link bait, I offered to provide them all here.

Check out video highlights on WebProNews or download the slides below. My copanelists gave out tons of useful information, and I was furiously taking notes. Well, in my head. I didn’t actually have any paper with me. But I’m hoping to try some new stuff out on the blog next week!

Introducing SEO (me)
SEO For Bloggers (Stephan)
More Tips for Bloggers (Andy)
Even More SEO (Aaron)

I’m headed out to Vegas for BlogWorld Expo. I’ll be speaking on a panel tomorrow with Aaron Wall, Stephan Spencer, and Andy Beal about SEO for blogging. If you can’t make it, you can check out my earlier blog posts on driving traffic to your blog. But surely you’d rather come by the panel. There might even be a little Buffy.

Comment, email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. if you’re going to be there and want to play craps Wednesday night. Or just want to say hi. But craps is more fun.

My feedburner numbers went down by more than half overnight. I considered spending the day crying in a corner, feeling abandoned and alone, wondering where it all went wrong, but first I thought I’d check a few other sites. Their numbers went down by around half as well.

Did half the population unsubscribe from the internet all of once? Nah, Google Reader just didn’t report numbers for yesterday. Compare my Friday subscription numbers:

to Saturday’s:

Everything looks about the same, except that those 511 subscribers from “Feedfetcher” are conspicuously absent. Reader reports numbers by including them in the request when it grabs a feed. Likely it didn’t include those numbers with requests yesterday due to some kind of a glitch. I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon. Occasional non-reporting of numbers by feed readers is one of the reasons Feedburner numbers tend to fluctuate.

(Note My Yahoo didn’t report numbers for Friday, but since I apparently don’t have many readers on My Yahoo, I didn’t notice.)

Or maybe there’s a “Google Reader subscribers unite in unsubscribing from the internet!” movement, but I’ll give it a few days before heading to that corner with my ocean of lonely tears.

Update: Feedburner has confirmed this as well.

I notice that G-Man’s domain has expired. No worries though. He doesn’t really need that one anymore, because he’s got mine! (ETA: softplus points out that this actually redirects through a Wordze affiliate, so I was right below when I said it may be someone else who grabbed it.)

Actually, I don’t know for sure it was G-Man who grabbed it. Or that whoever registered it even knows about this site. Maybe someone just thought vannessafoxnude.com was an awesome domain name — this person was just jogging one day and the domain came from the sky like divine inspiration. “I know!”, thought that inspired voice inside this person’s head. “Vanessa Fox. Nude. Only with two Ns! Perfect!” And then the logical thing to do with a domain name like is redirect it to Wordze. Clearly.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed, as I tend to spell my own name correctly when I type it into a browser bar, so many thanks to The Mad Hat for pointing it out. The domain was registered about a month ago and hopefully someone from Wordze will come by and let me know if it’s mostly giving them traffic from those who don’t know how to spell my name or from searchers looking for porn because I mostly get the latter, so maybe we could trade.

ETA: As noted above, John (softplus) spotted that the domain redirects through wordzee.com and indeed it does. It 302s to wordzee.com, then to a tiny URL that 302s to wordze.com. Clever. No idea who owns wordzee.com. Probably Dave. (Just kidding, Dave!)

Important things first! Joss Whedon, who surely you all know of Buffy fame, is gearing up to do a new show with Eliza Dushku on Fox! Eliza, of course, played Faith the kick ass vampire slayer on Buffy and if you’re saying wasn’t Buffy the slayer then yes, it’s confusing. I’ll loan you the DVDs. Or just come over to Buffy night on Tuesdays. It’ll all make sense. Anyway, this is fantastic news for sci fi fans and Buffy fans and really, anyone who’s a fan of good TV. You do like good TV don’t you?

In other news, I’ve teamed up with my twin potato fan, Greg Niland, for what was previously his show (and now is MY show, er, I mean our show, no evil laugh here, nu uh), GoodKarma, on Webmaster Radio. We’ll do the show live at the same time the show has always aired — Thursdays at 1pm Pacific, and we did the first one today. Check it out if you want to hear us ramble, I mean provide insightful commentary, on the recent very tiny (you may not have even heard of it it was so small) Google paid links controversy, the PageRank deductions, and how I feel about going from a PR 7 to a PR 6. (Toolbar PageRank means nothing! No one should even look at it! But why did I have to go down? *SOB!*) On the plus side, it’s hard to even see that diminishing green bar through the tears.

And in even more news, writing at Search Engine Land continues. Despite my mockery of Hakia’s musical efforts (but the mockery was all in good fun! I love that CD actually. How can you get any better than songs about search?), they let me into their offices a couple of weeks ago when I was in NY for SMX Social Media and we talked natural language processing and semantic indexing and social networking through search.

Told you there was something for everyone. What more could you want than Buffy, PageRank rants, and search? Well, maybe a robot butler who brings you coffee in the mornings.