The Wardman Wire

This is a series of late evening weekday Hints and Tips that I aim to post at around 10pm. I’ll keep going for as long as I have things to say. These are a grab basket, so take what you find useful.

Who is visiting my Blog

I came across the concept of a Blog Cloud a couple of years ago. I’m posting it here because I have found myself using the idea repeatedly across a number of my blogs.

So, what is a “Blog Cloud”

Go to the Google search box, and type in:

“<your name - or something else unique to your blog>” +blog

So for this blog, I would type:

“matt wardman” +blog

Just look at the number of results, and it will give you a quick and dirty measure of “how much of the internet related to blogs acknowledges that you exist”. This is your “Blog Cloud”.

Putting your name in quotes forces Google only to find pages with that literal text string, rather than (say) pages with Matt or Wardman, but not both.

The “+blog” instructs Google that pages must contain the word “blog”, which prevents your name on general websites being included if the page does not also include “blog”.

It is good way to see the influence of your blog growing, and one way to encourage yourself to maintain blogging motivation.

Caveats

Obviously, for this to be meaningful you have to have a fairly unique text string to search for. It would not work, for example, for “John Smith” or “Sally Jones”. Or, for that matter, for someone sharing the name of someone famous.

If you are called “Raquel Welsh” or “Gordon Brown”, then you could try using a phrase associated with your blog - perhaps its title.

This approach will also give different results depending on the options you use for your Google search .

One way to check whether the results are meaningful for your phrase and site is to scroll through a few results screens on Google, and see if any of the sites coming up do not relate to your blog.

A few Examples

Quite crude, and this is a rough measure with a few elephant traps, but they look to me to more or less reflect the popularity of the various blogs.

• Recess Monkey : 294,000
• Mr Eugenides : 252,000
• Matt Wardman : 9670
• Dizzy Thinks : 256,000
• The Yorkshire Ranter: 130,000
• Paul Linford : 249,000
• The Labour Humanist : 23,700
• Kerron Cross : 166,000

Tags: blogger hints and tips, tips at ten, recent readers, blog popularity, blog community, rules of thumb for your blog, daily blog tips, blog cloud[tags]blogger hints and tips, tips at ten, recent readers, blog popularity, blog community, rules of thumb for your blog, daily blog tips, blog cloud[/tags]