Think about it: if a person arrives at my blog expecting to get opinions and commentary on the NFL, then that person will be upset to see posts on movies or economics. The same goes for anyone expecting to see a post on my wife or kids, which is why I'm moving any stories I have to tell about my family over to our family blog.
Lord knows, there are enough niche topics to cover out there, and it seems like you can find a group of like-minded individuals for anything under the Sun these days. That has been one of the most wonderful things about this thing here called the Internetses: no one has to feel alone when loving whatever it is they love these days. There's a group for that!
Shoot, at one time (pre-Phantom Menace), I even belonged to the Jek Porkins Fan Club group on Yahoo! Groups (long since deceased). Just try to tell me that wasn't cool! All eight of us even convinced Hasbro to make a Jek Porkins action figure (pictured below). Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice. Yes, I still have mine!
But when I was casting about, trying to decide where I could specialize in just one area, I had a hard time narrowing down my list of interests. Certainly, I could focus my energies on just fantasy football, but there are plenty of people who cover that fan base well enough already. If I really want to write about FFB, then I could always contribute future articles to a place like KFFL.com, which already published articles from me way back in 1998. No worries there.
I figured I could write strictly about movies and entertainment, no matter how out-of-date my reviews might be. I often stumble across movies that I really enjoy, and which I think are somewhat forgotten or ignored in the larger Hollywood scene. Brick, The Hot Rock, and Point Blank all fit into that category. However, when I did a word search for all the keywords I used for my review of film noir (in which I really wanted to highlight Brick), my own blog post did not show up anywhere in the first seven or eight pages of results. Using my own labels! Which really means that so many other people already got the word out on Brick, my own post was unnecessary.
But then I had an idea: I could tailor a blog to just cover one area that still seems to mystify many people. I could help people live better lives! I could... well, explain how to structure search terms in an engine like Google in order to find the most relevant hits soonest. Crazy? Maybe. I do seem to have an uncanny ability to find whatever it is I'm searching for within Google or any other search engine. Finding the symbol for the Greatest American Hero online after seeing it on The Big Bang Theory was just one example.
Another example: just today, I thought about a friend of mine who commented on Facebook about the song "Human" by The Killers. It's a great song, but many people dislike or openly criticize the lyrics of the chorus: "Are we human? Or are we dancer?" When I used the search term "are we human or are we dancer" in Google, of course, I retrieved all the information directly related to the lyrics in the song. Of over 40,400,000 hits for that search term, the first hit was the Wikipedia page for the song itself. In the discussion on their page, the Wikipedia folks mentioned how much controversy the lyrics caused, and some people call the lyrics silly.
As a Killers fan, I was not satisfied with reading the negative comments about the lyrics. I wanted to know more about them, and I wanted to help my friend understand more about what the lyrics meant. I found one link from another blogger that explained the lyrics from the point of view of the band. They said their lyrics were inspired by a comment by (in)famous gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who once said the U.S. is raising "a generation of dancers" (meaning, puppets on the ends of strings). Controversy solved, no?
And yet, I also seemed to remember reading an old science fiction story where humans met an alien race called Dancer or Dancers. Boy, try to find any reference to old sci fi online, much less a specific reference like that! If it wasn't written by one of the biggies like Asimov, fugheddaboudit!
To try to find anything that supported my hunch, I tried the search term "human race sci fi", which returned 3,270,000 hits. None of those seemed to be all that relevant, but one link was for the blog DarkMatters mentioned above. One hit was for a photo from Flickr, for which the person who uploaded the picture used the lyrics from the song. On that photo, a Flickr user named vtpeacenik made a comment along the lines of what I wondered, whether the song referenced an old sci fi story. From her comment, I knew I was not the only person who made that cognitive link from the song lyrics.
Once more, I modified the search terms in Google to "alien race dancer sci fi". This time, the search returned only 144,000 hits, and guess what was number three on the list? This page! An author of science fiction named Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote about a race of aliens known as Dancers back in 1997. While that's not old enough to match my memory of reading the story when I was a kid, it could very well be that I picked up this book for light reading during that time frame. It's still available for sale here, for as low as one penny (plus S&H)!
I've written in the past about searches I've conducted while in the process of writing other blog posts. With this blog, I will write strictly about searches I'm doing for other purposes, all while exploring what works well and what doesn't. I will also add some tips and tricks I've learned along the way, such as how to use math to deliver better search results. Strange, but true.
Is it sacrilegious to use a quote from Jesus to write about a secular topic like Internet search? Perhaps, just a little. If I can think of a better name for the blog, perhaps I'll change it.
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