Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

Harry Perkins: Well the blogs been running for a while now, has it gone as you had expected?

Simon Perry: Funny you mention that, I had an inclining tonight that my Schemes , Dreams & Trivia categories had been a bit under nourished in, what is probably, quite a while now. A quick glance at the Categories on the home page gave it away … the numbers tell the story. Two of the three are in the bottom five categories - out of the nineteen. Trivia is second. Behind technology.

HP: Two of your main pillars are in the bottom five? How did that come to be?

SP: Well the amount of Trivia is both pleasing and worrying. I love trivia, it’s great … but I’m quite snobbish as to the type of trivia I think is acceptable. Which now I say it, sounds unnecessarily twisted. But reading through the Trivia category, I’m pleased with what I’ve selected.

HP: Do you get much traffic on Trivia?

SP:I do, probably the highest.

Thinking about it, link blogs and stats packages would be a good idea. When reviewing traffic you would be able to have the headline rather than the URL. Segmenting with catagories would also be useful. Or does something like TypePad doing this already?

You know the good thing about the trivia is, it brings a lot of people to your site - it wasn’t my original intention, but it’s been an unexpected bonus. Far and away the busiest was about Prince Charles - I posted what I had read on PopBitch a few days before the rumour became headlines. It was coming up first on a Prince Charles Rumour search on Google. The busiest day, 17 November, which was from memory the day after Have I Got News For You spoke about searching for the story on Google - the site had over 20,000 hits in 24 hours. It stayed high in Google for quite a while, until it got pushed to four by Google spammers, forcing their advertising to the top. Interestingly as of today Prince Charles Rumour it’s the second site, but on Prince Charles Rumour it’s 2nd on the 2nd page - UK/US spellings.

ZippoTricks stories have also been hugely popular. There are others, but I sometimes you can have too much detail.

HP: So what about the other two? Where are your Dreams and Schemes?

SP: My head has been very lively with Schemes recently, even if I haven’t been typing them in to the blog. Some are on paper - shock horror - and more recently I’ve recorded some. I’m playing with different ways of get ideas down.

I think we’ve all realised that ideas are nothing without execution and crucially they get stronger when shared and discussed. So I’m going to act more consistently on my original intention for the site - chuck some out there for people to develop, or otherwise. That reminds me, I must code up my Creative Commons.

I’m working on the Dreams.

HP: I know it’s late, so that for giving your time.

SP:You’re welcome, I enjoyed it.

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