Xanga’s search engine is dead again.  What else is news?!  I’m just appreciative that it sometimes works!  But hell…I need it: Do you think I can remember everything I’ve ever blogged?  Ha!   So I have this great idea…but a shadowy déjà vu comes around suggesting the possibility that I may have blogged the topic before.  But how can I know without searching for it?  I mean, after all, I write half my blogs in a half-crazed state of visionary euphoria.  And I write the other half in a fully-crazed state of drug-induced revisionary euphoria.  And it’s not like I read them or nothing.  So how would I know unless I search?

It would nice to be able to use Google to search our blogs.  Google is undoubtedly the best search engine in the world with 32% of the world’s search hits—and growing.  And while it provides a huge amount of hits—378,000—on the keyword “Xanga”, alas, it offers little prowess in being able to search the contents of all Xanga blogs.  Hence, my fallback to Xanga’s never-quite-reliable, but Xanga-content-rich search engine.

But regardless, those 378,000 hits are impressive!  And it got me thinking: How do they compare to the hits for other high-profile blogs on the internet?  So I did a little playful investigating and found:

Search word:

Xanga                    378,000

Blogger                  353,000

blogspot                 137,000

LiveJournal            121,000

Wow—Xanga’s #1  on the World’s Best Search Engine !

Now if your search Google with the search word “weblog”, you’ll get an amazing 1,180,000 hits.  If you then do a joint search using the search words “weblog” and …

Xanga                    80,400

Blogger                  69,000

blogspot                 11,900

LiveJournal            5,290

Xanga leads again!

And, then—and this just blows me away—when I continued to subset my search with the search words “weblog” + “Xanga” by adding “notforprophet”, I came up with 1,270 hits—representing 1 out of every 1,000 hits for “weblog” in the world!    Hell, could I really be so popularized?  Or is the blogging phenom more parochial than I thought?!

But the truth is, those 1,270 hits are not really hits on my blog, but mostly hits on all of you somehow referencing my blog or personage.  So a mighty thanks to the assembly of all of you for making me feel so very … special.

Four blogs back (Massive Spikes....), a Xangan named bob left a comment of concern for the "negativity" he was discerning in some of the comments on that blog. 

I slammed bob pretty hard because I thought one of the other Xanga admins was posing, i.e., wearing an alias mask.  It turns out that *bob* was not a mere alias as I (wrongly) surmised, but is in actuality john's brother and an investor in Xanga.

Once I was enlightened, I responded with this comment:

bob,

My apology to you.  You've kept such a low-profile for so long that I miscontrued your presence.  And believe me, I understand the *oversensitivity*.  By the way, thanks for the stats, I collect them!

Let's never forget: Peeps are peeps, and we all have feelings.

The stats, he shared, by the way were this:

I see how everyone on the Xanga team works their ass off to scale a user base that grows at 5% a week, with pageviews growing at 10% a week. (Put another way, Xanga's user base doubles every 3 months and pageviews double every 7 weeks.)

Another way to look at that, if the trend were to continue, would be to predict that there would be over 12 million Xangans in the year 2004.  Now that would be incredible.

There's a feather on the running path,
A bright feather just a step ahead.
Don't stop for that feather,
Don't pick up that feather,
Unless you need it for your war dress.

Donuts and Diet Pepsi for breakfast?

No thanks.  I'd rather run.

This is cool.  Let's collaborate on a blog.

OK. Let's.

I'll go first, you follow.

No.  I want to go first.

OK. Go ahead.

Treason dost never prosper.  What's the reason?

For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

So you heard that before.

Yep.

*joint laughter*