Key search terms for June

Okay, I'm a little late. I blame the Canada Day long weekend.

Without further ado, and for no one's edification but my own, here's the search terms that brought people here in the month of June:

The number one search term was "Compusmart closing," with 27% of the total. In fact, if as many people who searched for the story about Compusmart's store closings actually shopped there, they wouldn't have gotten into trouble in the first place.

In a close second (22%), Oakley's sale to Luxxotica garnered a lot of interest.

Lululemon's impending IPO (shouldn't that have happened by now?) showed strong interest for the third straight month (15%).

My personal favorites are, as always, the wild cards. The "what the hell is this person looking for?" category:

vole problem Calgary
vole exterminators Apparently it's worse than I thought.

Tweeter stops severance to employees. I hadn't heard this elsewhere and failed to corroborate it, but it makes a good story, doesn't it?

distad pain tool I have no idea what they were looking for, but if I start a heavy metal band, this will be our name.

For great t-shirts, check out the fine folks at Dirty Microbe, from whom I stole borrowed the above illustration.

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I am deeply disappointed in all of you

...for not calling me out on the terrible pun in one of last week's posts:

Fuss over oil
If you're worried about apple pie reserves, that's going to raise the spot price of apples as people stock up on the basic ingredient. I would also expect pastry dough to rise in demand.

*tap* *tap* is this thing on?

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Search terms for May

It's that time again: where I perform a round up of the most compelling search terms that Google Analytics tells me people used to find this blog.

There has been huge interest in Lululemon's forthcoming IPO. A whopping 32.6% of searchers came here looking for information about the public offering.

10.2% of searchers were looking for more information about Mark Twight, who trained the actors in the film "300."

Wild Card Awards:

Proof Of My Wisdom Award:

forzani takeover

Who called it? Oh, right, I did.

Beating A Dead Horse Award:

i hate HBC

The "I Can't Believe People Are Still Buying Alpacas" Award:

alpaca market forecast

canadian tax re alpacas

beware alpaca industry

alpacas boom or bust

...and sundry variations thereof

The "Two Sides To Every Story" Award:

hip-hop killing the music industry

what's killing hip-hop?

The "What the Hell?" Award:

dominatrix in calgary

tied with:

creepy in-law advice -mother

tied with

rappers who are masons

The "How Appropos" Award:

professional opinion quotes on caffeine

My professional opinion on caffeine: Yes, please!

The "Nice Try, Kid" Award:

professional opinions about how bad homework is.

*today's graphic is courtesy of the excellent webcomic Questionable Content

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Bonus Feature: Search Terms For April

Like most people, my favorite subject is myself. I had so much fun last month interpreting the search terms that people used to find this blog, that I decided to make it a regular feature.

Even with an early lead, searches for Solengo Capital fell off, allowing "Lee Distad" to be the top search term, beating the energy traders by 21%. People coming to this blog know what they want, and it appears to be me.

Ironically, former Dealbreaker Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Spiers beat Solengo Capital by being searched for 7% more than them.

Despite (or perhaps because of) being a pack of lies, the fake poodle story was the sixth most popular search item this month.

Either the disgruntled ex-Forzani employee is still trying to build his case, or there's more than one of them, using terms like:

forzani group court cases
john forzani wealth

...he (or they) can always form a support group with the people who were using these terms:

circuit city sucks
associate dismissal from hbc
zellers calgary store manager given severance pay
performance management hbc

This one I take personally, although I choose to wear it as a badge of pride:

"gatherer of useless facts"

Winner of the "I Learned Something New Today" award (I didn't know Calgary had a vole problem!):

vole exterminators calgary

The "I Think You're Gonna Be Disapointed With This Website" award:

candian[sic] sexy girl

The "Oh God, Now I'm Going To Get More E-Mails From The Tinfoil Hat Brigade" award:

illuminati sam zell

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A New First

Going over April's metrics with Google Analytics I discovered an odd occurence. The search term "Lee Distad" is no longer the #1 term used to find this blog. So far this month, the term that brought in the most traffic was "Solengo Capital," which trumped the use of my own name as a key word by 15%.

What this means, I have no idea.

Solengo Capital, as you might recall, is in an ugly legal battle with Dealbreaker.com over the latter's scoop of their marketing brochure.

Meanwhile in other Imbroglio news, journalist Gary Weiss has some rude things to say about Solengo's principals on his blog.

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Sorry To Disappoint

Been a little quiet here the past two days at BusinessOpinions HQ. You could blame it on the Birthday Hangover but that would be a lie. In addition to being a moderately slow news day yesterday, work and family commitments have taken up much of my time. Also, to go along with the request from my editor at CE Pro to "write more stuff" I am experimenting with an innovative new writing style that I like to call "start the article more than three hours before the deadline on Sunday Night."

Fret not though, I will endeavor to bring you the snark you crave.

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Happy Birthday to Lee Distad's Professional Opinion!

It was one year ago today that businessopinions.blogspot.com began, with this post entitled "The Perils of a Low Unemployment Rate."

We started small, only pecking out a blog post or two a month, until last July, when we found our calling and started picking up speed, making rude comments about the tech sector, real estate, and whatever aspect of business catches our ire attention.

In the past year, we (me) at Lee Distad's Professional Opinion have seen the popularity of this blog grow and grow, and acheived the following:

An invitation to write for CE Pro, the best trade weekly in the industry

Invitations to write guest content for other blogs

Been snubbed at CEDIA Expo by the president of Seanix/A&B Sound, who apparently can't take a joke

Site traffic that hovered in the low-double digits for months, before exploding into the four digits almost overnight one day

Private emails from Sony personnel telling me "Right on!"

All the brilliant, insightful, and thought-provoking comments left by readers, some of which were better and more informative than what I had written

Twenty-seven rejection letters from Literary Agents for my Book Project (twenty-eighth time is the charm, maybe?)

So thank you, thank you, thank you to all my loyal readers, old and new. Happy Birthday to us, and stay tuned for what our second year will bring us!



*I like monkeys, in case you didn't know.

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Bonus Feature: Top Google Search Terms for March

In case you happen to both live under a rock, and not blog about it, Google Analytics is freeware that tracks the traffic of your website. Even more fun than being able to see a map overlay of where your visitors are reading from (Hello Buenos Aires!), it also provides data on the search terms people used to find your site. As you would expect, the most common terms were my name and the name of this blog, followed by brand names like Sony, Panasonic, and Apple. But the patterns that I percieve in the search terms are sometimes interesting, and sometimes odd.

The news item that drew the most new readers was speaker maker Miller and Kreisel's bankruptcy. No less than twenty-six variations of "M&K bankrupt" were used.

A person or persons with an axe to grind against Forzani Group Ltd tried to dig up dirt with the following terms over the course of the month:

"professional users of sportcheck"
"sportcheck work blog"
"sportcheck wrongful dismissal"
"sportchek disciplinary"

A surprising number of former Eaton's employees came looking for information about their outstanding severance pay with many variations on the terms "eatons bankruptcy when payment?"

Wild Card of the Month:

"professional opinion on aromatherapy"

Ironically, I don't have an opinion on aromatherapy.

Runner-Up:

"the size 0, professional opinion"

My opinion: EAT SOMETHING!

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an off-topic whine about daylight savings time

My diurnal rythms have really taken a beating this week. I'm normally up at 5am, caffeinated, and pounding out invective, analysis, snark (and frankly, sometimes just lamely parroting whatever I read on Dealbreaker the day before) on my keyboard.

But this week hasn't gone according to plan. My body thinks that it's 4am when my alarm clock goes off in the morning, and rebels.

Thus, I appologize for being a little light on content this week. I hope to be better equipped to deal with mornings in a couple of days.

*Update*
Long or Short Capital has the problem with daylight savings time summed up perfectly.

*2nd Update*
Thanks to Dealbreaker for the reference!

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Canadian Business Magazine notices Blogs, hails them as revolutionary

Canadian Business Online

Blogs get started by bloggers writing about the things the bloggers have seen in the news media. The news media then notices the blogs, and starts reporting on the blog "trend," which is analogous to brontosauruses saying to each other "Have you noticed all these small, warm, furry creatures scuttling around in the undergrowth? How cute! Of course, we're so much bigger and better than they are." The New York Times even has a page in the Sunday edition that reports on what's new in the "blogosphere." Many media-watching bloggers find this endlessly amusing.

Back on to my topic, Canadian Business' Alex Mlynek faithfully reports on the emergence of blogs as not only an outlet for John Q Public to hold forth on their obsessions field of study, but as viable revenue generating businesses, and upstart challengers to the mainstream media from which the public can recieve their daily fix of factoids.

Out of necessity, articles like Mlynek's need to be written from the perspective that the reader is a martian (or perhaps a network or newspaper executive) who doesn't know anything, and needs to be educated from scratch. Thus, you end up with bytes that come across as delightfully wide eyed and naïf:

This one-woman operation's monthly figures don't yet come
close to the huge paid circulation numbers that help mags such as Us Weekly and
People generate hundreds of millions in advertising revenue each year. Still,
you can't help but notice these kinds of scoops, plus the ad revenue their
purveyors are starting to attract--and see how gossip sites are biting at the
heels of the big players.

Wow, you can make money on the Internet? Why wasn't I told about this before?

Of course, my favorite takewaway from the article is this:

Another distinctive feature is the bloggers' snarky and
humorous tone. A recent Defamer.com post about actor Brandon Routh's engagement,
for instance, is headlined "Some guy who played Superman engaged to girl you've
never heard of." What marks the good blogs from the bad is a unique, no-bullshit
take.

(Note to self: more snark, more "no-bullshit," and research other blogs for "unique" aspects I can copy incorporate)

This attitude amongst the "new journalists" in the "new media" isn't restricted to the celebrity gossip blogs that Mlynek focuses on. Most of the primary sources in my daily news matrix are blogs: Dealbreaker for business and financial news, and CE Pro for news relating to my industry (readers might recall that I scooped CE Pro back in August on the Klipsch/API deal), amongst many others. Inevitably the common thread amongst all the sources in my matrix is a "call it as they see it" attitude, and a small dose of snark (or in Dealbreaker's case, a horse-tranquilizer sized dose of snark).

One byte that I took exception to, from a hollywood publicist who should know better was this:

Rosenfield also worries, if a blog posts incorrect
information, it's hard to get a correction. "If a paper prints something that is
wrong...I say, 'You printed this, and this is not accurate.' [With blogs], you
can't find half of them," he explains.

Obviously, Rosenfield doesn’t spend a large amount of time perfecting search terms on Google. Even just typing "George Clooney+blog" would probably do it. Give me five minutes with Google, and I can find anything, including the email address for Ms. Mlynek that I dug up just so I could tell her how much I appreciated her article.

Naturally, me blogging about a magazine article that was written about blogs is exactly the kind of meta-media that we like to see around here. Here at businessopinions.blogspot.com I will continue to expand boundaries, inculcate paradigms and tread new ground for your reading pleasure.

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