Category: Blogging & Online Media

I was having a look at my January stats this morning, and I’ve got to say, this is a surprisingly good start to the year as far as site traffic goes. I mean, I never started this site planning on being the new Boing Boing or anything but I have to admit it’s flattering to know there are people other than your mother reading what you have to say.

To give you an idea of how the blog has evolved from the handful of hits it was getting a year ago before becoming thatcanadiangirl in its current incarnation, here are some stats. Feel free to skip this if you find it’s a pile of rubbish, because it really is.

• Over 2000 unique visitors;
• Nearly 75,000 hits;
• Visitors came from 73 countries in total;
• 621 search engine queries landed people on my site;
• … which were brought on by 350 different keyphrases searched.

So… the spammers must count for a good handful of the countries in there, but the hits up there are only for viewed traffic, so shouldn’t include searchbots and spambots (they’re worth 10,000 hits on top of the 75k), but otherwise, that’s still a decent number of visits!

Keep it comin’ and I’ll keep bloggin’!

…you notice the first snow of the winter and your first thought is “I must blog about it!”

The BBC Technology reports:

Bookseller Joe Gordon, 37, had worked for Waterstone’s book chain for 11 years and was based at its Princes Street store. In his blog, the Woolamaloo Gazette, Mr Gordon said he was dismissed for gross misconduct after the firm said his writings had brought it into disrepute. […] Mr Gordon went on to say that he would occasionally mention his work life online, coining phrases such as “Bastardstone’s” and referring to his manager as “Evil Boss”.

“I pointed out that I had not set out to deliberately ruin the company’s image. In fact I don’t think I have even inadvertently; if I had wished to do that then I would have been running less satirical and far more biting comments on a rather more regular basis, rather than commenting from time to time about a bad day at work, a grumpy manager or the like. You’d think I had run a sustained propaganda campaign of subversion.” Mr Gordon claimed his dismissal breached his right to free speech. He said that Waterstone’s had no clear policy on blogging and had not accepted his offer to stop writing and accept a warning.

I usually have sympathy for bloggers who get mistreated by employers when they really can’t see it coming, like in Queen of Sky’s case (where she was fired for having photos in uniform on her site, even though male employees had been doing for years without problems). But this chappie made his own identity public, his employer’s identity public and slandered the company’s name on a somewhat regular basis. Ok, at this point, you can assume there are chances a coworker, employer or customer will see the blog in question and be somewhat bothered by the comments.

There was no surprise then that the management chose to bring up the issue with Mr. Gordon when they found out about it. Now, he wasn’t fired on the spot like Ellen aka Queen of Sky was. He was given the choice between toning down/stopping his comments about work when blogging or leaving his job. He HAD A CHOICE! Then he keeps complaining! It’s almost worthy of a non-deadly Darwin Award.

At least, sit down with the employer, agree to stop slandering work on the blog until an agreement on what is acceptable and what isn’t is drawn up with the employer.

Writing a blog is a responsibility as much as a right of expression. Actions have reactions, calling your supervisor an “Evil Boss” and your company “Bastardstone’s” IS likely to piss off the company.

Using the excuse that talking about the company in a blog isn’t written in their contract is a poor excuse. Pure common sense says that no matter how you express it, too much complaining about your employer in a public environment will innevitably lead to discontentment on their part! In the nascent blogging world, people really need to learn to use their common sense.

So a gun doesn’t come with an indication expressedly saying you shouldn’t use it to shoot yourself in the foot, does that mean you should do it??

Click on “(more)” to see what my comment on his blog was.

(more…)

Andrew created a custom-made shoutbox for me today! If you want to leave me a shout to let me know you’ve popped by, that’s the way to do it! It’s always good to know someone’s reading me! 🙂

Laissez-moi des petits bonjours de temps en temps dans ma boîte à messages à droite! C’est motivant de savoir qu’y a quelqu’un à l’autre bout qui lit ce que j’ai à dire! 🙂

In the control panel for this website, I can see what search results landed people on my website, as I’ve explained before.

This morning, I had a peek, and this result made me laugh out loud! “what can i do on the sims 2 and can i have sex on it and produce babies”

Hahaha! Who formulates Google questions like that?

Alright, this gave me a bit of a giggle, now back to work…

Who are you people visiting my blog? I’ve been looking at the statistics for my blog on a regular basis and the information gathered by Awstats is fascinating!

For example, the highest number of visits are from the USA. I don’t recall giving the address to my blog to anyone in the US, so it must’ve happened through search engines and blog directories! Second comes the European Union, closely followed by Canada. Now those Canadians, I can bet I know who they are 🙂 It’s good to know they’re still reading me! The UK results aren’t comparable to the visits from the first three countries, even including all my own visits to the blog to update it! Then there’s about 25 more countries, from every part of the world, which is incredible! It makes me want to know who those people are!

When it comes to keywords, the most popular search keyphrase so far this month from Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines have been “If you leave me now” and other variations on the lyrics and content of the absolutely mad Three mobile adverts that I talked about in a previous post. Next, it seems a lot of people like the 1970s Office as much as I do, as it comes up as second most popular search, closely followed by people looking for “honeymoon photos”. A few people searched for sushi in Menorca, somehow I don’t think they’ll have much luck. Better stick to tapas, fresh bread and cheese.

Now for the oddest search results, there’s someone who searched for “if you re being chased by a police dog try not to go through a tunnel” and landed on my blog! The total winner for bizarre result is “looking for people who want to have sex”. I mean what kind of weirdo types that into a search engine and expects to find those people?! Which leads to further questionning, how the hell did that lead him/her to MY blog?! Of course, I’m aware I’m only getting myself in trouble here, because the search engines will catalogue this page as well, and it’ll only confuse those desperate weirdos some more!

So all you strangers, leave me comments, however random they are, to let me know you’ve stopped by! I love it!

[See all Funny Google Searches]

Did anyone notice the images in the top corner change every time you load the site?

How cool is that?