Along Came A Spider
Spider, crawler, robot, all are terms for the automated programs the search engines send out to grab your content and index it. They go by names such as Googlebot, Openbot, Scooter, FAST-WebCrawler, and vspider to mention just a few. If you are interested. SpiderSpotting by Danny Sullivan will satiate even the largest appetite for this stuff.
It's fun perusing the logs seeing who has visited my site. Discovering what they looked at how long they stayed, what part of the world they live in. The most interesting part for me is how they got here. Before I discovered my log files I had no idea where visitors were coming from and why. I thought hell I must be a great writer since hundred's of people were reading a story I wrote entitled "Did I Wake You?"
after looking at the logs It was clear that was not the case, most of the people reading the story got there by searching for "pancreitis, gallbladder, pain below the sternum, blood tests" all words with search engine links to my story. More logical was the interest in my Son Chris's article on Covey Metaphysics. You remember Stephen Covey's Book ("The Seven Habits of Highly Annoying People") the title David Weinberger applied to the book when I sent him a link to Chris's article. The article is titled "How the ‘Real World’ [territory] at last Became a Myth" Annotated to Address the Metaphysics of Covey it has been very popular still receiving five or six hits a day over 300 in the last three months, mostly from Google search terms such as "Franklin Covey, Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Metaphysics" I'm prejudiced of course but I think it's popular because it is well done. The one I'm still puzzling over however is why sexual + fantasy brings them to my site. I haven't given up searching, maybe there is some good stuff here after all. And while I'm on the subject of robots if you haven't read Paul Ford's Robot Exclusion Protocol you're missing a gem.
All these bots, spiders, crawlers got me thinking about The Cure's song lullaby
"on candystripe legs spiderman comes
softly through the shadow of the evening sun
stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead
looking for the victim shivering in bed
searching out fear in the gathering gloom and
suddenly! a movement in the corner of the
room! and there is nothing i can do when i
realise with freight that the spiderman is having
me for dinner tonight
quietly he laughs and shaking his head creeps
closer now closer to the foot of the bed and
softer than shadow and quicker than flies his
arms are all around me and his tongue in my
eyes "be still be calm be quiet now my precious
boy don't struggle like that or i will only love
you more for it's much too late to get away or
turn on the light the spiderman is having you
for dinner tonight"
and i feel like i'm being eaten by a thousand
million shivering furry holes and i know that in
the morning i will wake up in the shivering cold
and the spiderman is always hungry..."
I think he's right the spiderman is having us for dinner tonight. The spiderman is always hungry.



Comments
I think I first came here via Movabletype News page. I'm Japanese, and enjoy reading your blog.
Posted by: Kiyo | March 21, 2002 9:04 PM | Reply to this comment
I came here via the referral logs on my own page. Thus the weblog net grows.
Posted by: Jak King | March 21, 2002 9:35 PM | Reply to this comment