What do you have a fear of?

In a new book entitled "Click", the author Bill Tancer explores how analysing what people search for can give us a better understanding of what people really think about a particular topic. Using Hitwise, the author took a look at what people have a fear of, by exploring searched for keywords that contained the words "Fear of" in them.

Search results form all the major UK search engines were used over a period of 12 weeks ending on the 14th of February 2009. Some of the finding were quite surprising:

• During this period, there were over 8,500 distinct terms containing the phrase ‘fear of’.
• The most searched for fear was ‘fear of flying’
• Fear of Cats? The most feared animal it seems is cats at number 2 on the list. As there are no films, bands or books that I can find that have this title, it does seem that lots of people really do seem to have an irrational fear of cats!

Top 10 Fear of Searches:

1. fear of flying (2.27% of all ‘fear of’ searches)
2. fear of cats (1.72%)
3. irrational fear of cats (1.34%)
4. fear of clowns (1.10%)
5. fear of long words (1.01%)
6. fear of heights (0.86%)
7. fear of the dark (0.62%)
8. fear of death (0.61%)
9. fear of spiders (0.43%)
10. fear of crime (0.36%)

You can buy a copy of Bill Tancer’s excellent book Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters on Amazon.co.uk.

ACDC - Money Made

From the new AD/DC album Black Ice

One reason Why Firefox is better than IE

Gspace Firefox Add-On

Here is just one of the many good reasons to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer:

Gapace is Firefox extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host.
After the installation, you'll get an option called "Gspace" in your "Tools" menu, which opens the GSpace window.

It's great for storing/sharing files with your friends. Also very good to backup photos and music files (as you can view/listen to them from Gspace).

For more information go to G.Space and to install the plugin: Gspace Add-on

Battle of the Films

Pink Panther vs. Street Fighter vs. Wolverine vs. Star Trek

In the next few months there are a few new films due to be released:

• The Pink Panther 2 (Feb 13th)
• Friday the 13th (Feb 13th)
• Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Feb 27th)
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1st)
• Star Trek (May 8th)

So before their release, do you think it is possible to tell which film will be the most popular?



Most Popular Film Search on Google
According to Google Insights for Search, over the past 30 days, slightly more people are searching for Street Fighter than Star Trek. If you combine the searches for Wolverine and X-men, it shows that this film is pretty popular in as far as web searches, with the Pink Panther lagging a little behind.

I am not sure if the amount of people searching for the films on the web will have any bearing on the box office, I guess only time will tell, but it is pretty interesting all the same...

Darren Rowse Video Interview

A little nerdy, but interesting interview with Darren Rowse, owner of ProBlogger and Digital-Photography-School blogs, which I have actually guest posted on before.

He has taught me loads, not only about blogging, but SEO and marketing in general and it is always good to listen to what he has to say. In this video he mostly talks about what it takes to make a successful blog. Most of it is obvious, things like always producing quality, worthwile content, but there are other gems in there aswell.

Darren according to Wikipedia:
In November 2002, while working as a part-time minister, for an on-line department store, and as a casual labourer, Rowse started LivingRoom.org.au, a blog about living in Australia, religion (mainly the emerging church movement), politics and other topics that he found interesting.

Rowse contributes to around 20 different blogs, although he is only actively blogging on two, - including topic specific blogs such as the Athens Olympics and the Michael Jackson court case - he runs with other bloggers.

His two personal blogs are Digital Photography Blog with reviews on digital cameras due to lack of views of his own photography, and ProBlogger which features tips on blogging. These two blogs get around 15,000-20,000 page views a day and over $20,000 in total ad revenue a month. Rowse attempts to contribute around 25 blog posts a month.

As of 30 January 2007, ProBlogger was listed as number seven on Technorati's most favorited blogs list and number 48 on the most linked to blog.

In 2006, Rowse was awarded the Best Web Development Weblog blog award in 2006 for ProBlogger.

Rowse is currently the vice president of training and development for b5media, the blog network he founded in September 2005 with fellow bloggers Jeremy Wright, Shai Coggins and Duncan Riley. The blog network claims to have over 200 blogs, and one of the largest new media networks in the world with one million page views a day in 2006

Velentines Ideas: Sexy Costume?

Ok, here's a good idea for valentines day, why not surprise the man of your life in a sexy costume... well, you didn't think I was going to suggest that I should dress up in a sexy fireman costume or something did you?

If you do plan on dressing up for valentines day, I would go for a Leg Avenue costume, definitely the sexiest and best quality costumes out there.

Loving Lovely Charts

Here is a fun simple way to impress your boss, with Lovely Charts, you can very quickly create flowcharts, network diagrams, sitemaps and wireframes. I know the diagram above means nothing but I created it and exported it as an image in only a few minutes

Other similar online programs include Gliffy, Flowchart.com and Draw that enable you to create diagrams and more in your
browser with drag-and-drop functionality. The main differentiator
between LovelyCharts and other online services is that it actually
makes your complex processes look incredibly good. Better yet, it’s
completely free and since last week, out of beta.

In terms of features, LovelyCharts has pretty much all the basics
covered, but you really need to try it out to get a feel of how rich
the web-based app really is even with its relatively simple feature
set. You can draw, align, insert symbols and icons, snap, zoom, import
& export, and so on - for a good overview, check the tour and the video demo.

I think one improvement that could be made would be alow you to upload a custom symbol, but other than that I think it really works well.

LovelyCharts was developed by RIA developer and user architect Jérôme Cordiez.

How to increase your carbon footprint

Introducing the Pizza Pro Circular Saw pizza cutter that could not only pointlessly increase your carbon footprint, but also the art of carving up a pie for eight infinitely more enjoyable.