Here's something I've been playing with for a few weeks. It's still not completely ready for launch, but I'd thought I'd share it with you all to get comments.

There are two parts to this. The first is a “Search Zeitgeist”. Basically it's a program that sorts through the traffic logs for the last 48 hrs, identifies the major search engines, and lists which keywords were entered to bring them to this site. It then displays the results in graphical form - the more often a phrase occurs, the larger the font.

So in the snapshot above, the most popular search terms to bring people here were “gary brolsma” and “filativa”. The live version can be found by clicking here.

Below it, you can find a “keyword zeitgeist” This is my attempt to get the system to read through the last 48 hours of postings and identify the key phrases. It's still very dumb at the moment, and can't tell a verb from a pronoun (gah!) so that still needs much more work. But the idea is there.