Boring Site Note: Quick Tag Cloud

March 23rd, 2008, 3 Comments »

As an SEO experiment, I started tagging (in addition to the categories at left) my blog posts about, I don’t know, 15 months ago. It’s impossible to measure precisely, but I don’t think it’s had a significant effect. Last month tag-based pages only got 823 page views, and a mere 123 visitors came from Technorati. There may be unknown ancillary SEO benefits to tagging, but now I just enjoy inventing peculiar descriptors for my posts (see, for example, .

Thanks to Ultimate Tag Warrior, here’s a quick tag cloud of the 200 most popular tags on this site. Keep in mind that this only reflects, maybe, one-eighth of all the posts on this site. There’s no frickin’ way I’m going back and manually tagging the other 4000-odd posts.

I’ve tried to be disciplined about not tagging entries with the same terms as I categorize them, but clearly I sometimes fail. I guess what happens is that I start writing about something, tagging each entry. Eventually I decide that it merits its own category, so I upgrade it. I might go back and remove the tags for malta, gozo, vancouver, travel, video, morocco and marketing to make the thing more useful.

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A Monkey Picks the Winners

April 10th, 2007, 1 Comment »

Maggie the macaque is the weirdest and my favourite aspect of TSN’s TV coverage of the playoffs. From Wikipedia:

Maggie was born and hand-raised at the Bowmanville Zoo in Bowmanville. At the zoo, she was trained to spin a wheel. In 2003, several executives and expert panelists from the Canadian sports broadcaster TSN decided that they would “do something random” with their show, and they ended up bringing Maggie onto their broadcasts to make predictions.

The absurdity of Maggie really appeals to me. Often times sports commentators take themselves a little too seriously, and the monkey really serves to undercut that. I wrote about her last year at this time, and she ran the table, beating the three sports pundits with a record of 9 and 6.

You can watch Maggie pick the first round winners online. Happily, this year she picked Vancouver to beat Dallas. Two of the pundits agreed with her, while the other three went with Dallas–it’s a split.

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