11:37 am, 28 Sep 04
popularity
Yahoo's search blog discusses blogging services. The graph is "which service are people searching for on yahoo?", which is a weird metric, but it might correlate to, uh, how dumb the users are-- how often do you search for a service rather than just typing in its address?
In a comment, the poster adds, "The teen bloggers on Xanga and LiveJournal right now might be the adopters of Blogger and Typepad down the line. Right now, searches on Blogger are about one-tenth of Live Journal and one-fifteenth of Xanga. Typepad doesn't have enough searches to enter the fray right now."
But I'm especially amused by the comment by "Andrew", which claims LJ ain't all bad 'cause people like
jwz use it. Heh.
In a comment, the poster adds, "The teen bloggers on Xanga and LiveJournal right now might be the adopters of Blogger and Typepad down the line. Right now, searches on Blogger are about one-tenth of Live Journal and one-fifteenth of Xanga. Typepad doesn't have enough searches to enter the fray right now."
But I'm especially amused by the comment by "Andrew", which claims LJ ain't all bad 'cause people like
jwz use it. Heh.
Depressingly often, according to Google's internal data. Remind me to expound on this topic to you off-journal.
But I'm especially amused by the comment by "Andrew", which claims LJ ain't all bad 'cause people like jwz use it. Heh.
I seem to recall this being my exact same argument, right down to the example.
When I'm looking for a site whose name I know, I often Google it instead of trying to remember whether it ends in com/net/org. That's usually way faster than waiting for DNS to time out.
I've told you before about how I have my browser set up so that I can type goto livejournal and it'll search Google with I'm Feeling Lucky. I guess with that I'd be counted quite a lot as searching rather than typing the address, but I do it because often the URL it's at is longer than the search string, and is often some awkward non-root page on a site that I can't remember because it's full of meaningless query string variables.
i'd probably alias it to "lj" if anything; it's not like you use any other sites!
Address Bar Habits
LiveJournal was a bad example of that. For LiveJournal, I have a wide variety of shortcuts, including my old “redirect server” which just redirects to different things depending on the URL but now only really gets used to go to r/lj/f (my friends page) and r/ljz/r (recent changes on LiveJournal's Bugzilla). Also, though, my browser is configured so that if I type “lj” followed by a username it goes to that journal, which I often use for “lj news” and “lj lj_dev”. I'd never type “livejournal.com” anyway, since aside from the front page being essentially useless I'm in the habit of typing “www.livejournal.com”, which saves the server a needless redirect on my behalf for what boils down to essentially two extra keystrokes. (“w” repeated three times takes negligibly longer than just once.)
The “goto” thing, as I said, is more for things which aren't at obvious URLs, or whose URLs are insanely long. What makes it useless for “root pages” is that the word goto plus the space is longer than “.com”. If I made it just “g” it'd be a win more often, but sadly that collides with the normal Google search!
And for a dissenting opinion:
The dissenting comment is like saying "Having a Movable Type blog is similar to being a sex fiend - Movable Type allows trackback and this is frequently used by porn spammers, so it doesn't matter who has one. People will still think you're a sex fiend".
Well, slow people perhaps.