Ethereal Phrases
logs
Selected Search Terms that led people to my web sites between 08/01/2009 – 08/16/2009
I am a web stats junkie. In addition to checking the number of visitors that come to my URLs (lab404.com, playdamage.org, deepyoung.org), I also check referral sites (other sites that linked visitors to my site), visited pages (where visitors went on my site), and search terms (phrases that visitors typed in at google which led them to my site). The search terms always surprising and surreal. They represent the linguistic intersection between my interests (as evidenced in my published online content) and other people’s desires (as evidenced by their search phrases). Not everything that everyone desires will lead to my published content, and some of my content won’t ever be desired by anyone; but these phrases represent those few points of connection between my personal idiosyncracies and the aggregate desires of the contemporary noosphere. These search terms are fascinating because they don’t simply arrive in the abstract form of aggregated numerical data. They arrive as specific English language phrases — some absurd in their occult particularity, some pathos-ridden in their anonymous banality. Taken as a whole, they form a kind of ongoing, unauthorized, biographical poem written about me by other people’s desires.
Between August 1 and August 16, 2009; 510 discrete search phrases led visitors to my sites. Below is an abridged selection of those phrases. Each line is a specific search phrase that someone typed into Google which resulted in them visiting some page of my site. (I welcome those who monitor their own stats to post similar “poems” in response).
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custom cars
creativity
spartan royal mansion
getty images license compliance
best frank zappa guitar solos
moment instant minute second exists gone
100 ways to ask youre mum if a friend can sleep
to hear a noise in dream
ways to wake up your roomate
sound bflat
farnsworth house
contrary to popular belief, underground fires are a
art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. it produces deepened perceptions of experience: art is not there simply to be understood; if it was, we should have no need of art
live video of cloninger speaking about theory
donnie darko ascii art
sentence complexion subtopics
klee
crank out the crap
cute 1950s borders
“what goes on”
how to catch lightning bugs
book of kells
italian design playgrounds
haughty levinas
vaughan oliver cd
what are the chacteristics of the web
history of rose of jericho and bougainvillea
what is ghost in the machine
galileo dropping an orange
daniel johnston beware of darkness, beware of evil
number of new york times prepared obituaries
rhetorical
waffle house integration
parajanov
cabinetry
cs lewis we are halfhearted creatures fooling around like ignorant child
artbase.dll
invention is the mother of necessities mcluhan
william
murakami haruki high res pics
scars in the hands of jesus
what advantages does multimedia have over a single medium?
deaf jesus
no one knows my heart
loud guitar solos
sweden
reason for 404
what is an artist’s statement
non linear narratives syllabus
now is the time of gods favor
radiohead
words
emily dickinson handwriting
neil young arguably greatest
figure
tightrope walker
what is internet art
gibby hanes
steez
the mobius palindrome
crest for fellowship
gradiation
communist
radar
prayer about the flesh that does you wrong
f0x
purple roses
robert venturi
what are 2 faces of breathing?
five properties of light
ethereal phrases
most technically proficient guitar solo
hijacking google images
pray super give me a power
lose of desire to live
plotfracture
how internet and telephony has revolutionized the way we watch tv.
beardsley
3d type design candy
circus posters
meister eckhart chicken and egg
history of bambini cologne
album sides
consumption and surfing subculture
n_gen
process
peter max
music
about
emily
memorabilia
primers
sweetheart plastics
facial rif for mocap
“without god” hildegard bingen
carnal torpor press thing
deleuze, apophasis
japanese candy vector
engulf
“to gather from the air a live tradition”
images
television test picture design bag
hue saturation value
jesus healing the blind
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3 Responses to “Ethereal Phrases”.
I too revel in my statistic addiction. Sad and wonderful really, as you can spy on others exploring your work. But then without that tool…you might never know the impact or spread your work attracts.
And so then I checked my statistics for search strings and all my most popular ones are more than boring. It’s either my name, or any number of combinations with the word game.
And NetPoetic hasnt been alive long enough to get the really interesting strings yet. Although we did get:
growing up in the 1990′s poem
tia in magazines
cheers, Jason
What a great piece! I especially like “spartan royal mansion/ getty images license compliance/ best frank zappa guitar solos/ moment instant minute second exists gone/ 100 ways to ask youre mum if a friend can sleep/ to hear a noise in dream…”
When I started Reconstruction, we were always tracking our stats. And, my co-editor, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, kept a list of some of the more bizarre strings. We wrote an editorial on the experience:
Keywords in the Post-Mechanic Codex
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/022/keywords.htm
One thing that made me very happy was the idea that somebody was on the web searching for something very specific, and instead found some kind of essay or book review. I don’t know if they stopped to read it… but I like to imagine that they did, and perhaps, in some way, our journal was able to broaden their mind in an unlikely direction.
Yes, this is interesting. I, too, am mesmerized by my site stats. I often use specifics URLs to link to my work, and my favorite of these is LordsPrayerThe.com, which leads to the piece “Lord’s Prayer, The.” I love the thought of someone searching for that word string, or typing in that URL, and reaching a site where the Lord’s Prayer is deconstructed, and then reconstructed into a new poem. I am sure some people are disturbed, and outraged.
Another of my favorites is “DeepPhilosophicalQuestions.com,” which is a popular search string on Google. Many of my visitors arrive at that URL and find the piece “Deep Philosophical Questions,” which is anything but that.
Finally, I-Pledge.org is another URL which people follow, only to find a site where I offer them the opportunity to rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance.
In short, using URLs in this way can be subversive, and fun. People are searching for one thing, and find something totally unexpected….
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