Financial & Travel Musings

I thought I’d try a little experiment with one of the blogs that I’ve not really used in quite a while.

What I did was to write a post matching the searches coming in to the blog and see how that did. Now, before you do that you obviously need some content for searches to find so seeing as we were in the depths of winter I wrote a few posts about that to begin with.

The first trickle of searches coming in were for things like Russian clothing and cold weather clothing. Fair enough as that matched some of the posts in a vague kind of way. So I wrote some more on the clothing angle. Next stream up was along the lines of rain wear which also seemed reasonable enough. However, a month down the line and it’s more along the lines of shiny winter clothes and girls in wet clothes which do follow the progression of the searches and subsequent posts but which seem a long way from the original ones!

As I’m only doing it as a side-line I’m only writing one post a week so it’s taking a while to bring in the search traffic but if you’d like to add it, pop on over to On a Postcard.

Popularity: 2% [?]

A few years ago renaming brands so that a single product name could be used across the world was all the rage. Thus we have Snickers instead of Marathon, Starburst instead of Opal Fruits and so on.

Oddly though it seems to have passed by gateway laptops who sell as Gateway in America but until quite recently as eMachines in Europe. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery as computers are a product that you’d expect to see marketed similarly around the world these days.

Why, of course, leaves the puzzle as to why they’re absorbing eMachines into Acer at the moment and offloading a lot of eMachines at bargain basement prices.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Nobody knows. The problem is that normal flu also kills people and, for the most part, there’s no great investigation into how they were before.

Obviously most of those who die are weak in some way whether that be through being old or sick or having some medical condition that weakens them. The difference with swine flu is that each case is investigated and usually overall details are published too. That doesn’t happen with normal flu deaths: at best you get the overall numbers at the end of the year.

So, despite all the publicity, nobody actually knows if we should be worried about the number of healthy people dying from swine flu as it could well be that just as many (perhaps many more actually) die from normal flu.

Popularity: 1% [?]