j's scratchpad

Dave Winer points to the Clarkbot, a Perl script Rick Heller wrote to search Feedster, a search engine that works with RSS feeds, to find blog posts about Wesley Clark.

Yesterday, I had more than 60 hits in my referer log related to the Clarkbot and the resulting blog post on Heller’s blog about Clark from my notes about a talk Clark gave in New Hampshire on Saturday. Heller comes to the Thursday night blog meetings. Today, I noticed the bot picked up another Thursday blogger’s post about the New Hampshire trip: Bloggers Hit the Campaign Trail from Bob Stepno’s Other Journalism Weblog. The bot and its weblog look pretty interesting.

Now that I’ve posted some material about campaign events by four of the Democratic presidential candidates, I’m very interested in seeing what URLs appear in my referer log. Most of the URLs that show up there are created when someone follows a link appearing in search results. The logged URL often indicates what the search terms were. I’ll be able to see what kind of information people are looking for regarding the candidates. I imagine traffic on my blog will increase greatly in the next few weeks as people seek information on the candidates to make an informed vote in a primary election. My traffic increased quite a bit during local elections here because of notes I posted on my blog about a local debate. People really do use the Internet as an educational tool during election season. (The Internet: more than just a fundraising tool.)

PS–I am not officially endorsing any particular political candidate on this blog and plan *not* to do so here. I don’t have an equal time clause or anything like that. I’m talking about Clark again because I think the technology Heller uses is interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2003 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.