As you can tell from the entirely un-sexy title, this is one for the analytics nerds.

Google Insights provides the interesting capability of viewing the relative search volume of keywords mapped to a geography. So for instance, Andrew Chen has used the tool to identify websites used by early adopters. This is handy both directly for web strategy, as well as indirectly as a proxy for spread of usage.

One feature that’s missing though is a quantitative measure of spread. I want to know, for instance, the degree of usage of TechCrunch relative to the NYT. Or of my new startup compared to established competitors. Or of a US brand compared to a competing European brand. And I want it in numbers.

For this, you need to take the CSV dump from Google Insights and take the standard deviation of the values for the “top regions for [keyword]” with some adjustments due to the dorky way that Google gives you data.

Or if you don’t want to do that, you could just plug your CSV files into the geographic spread calculator that I threw together this morning.

Here are some fun queries I prepared earlier:

• Obama vs McCain internationally
• Obama vs McCain in the US
• Top social networks
• Australian print newspapers
• “Olympic swimming” vs “South Ossetia”

Have fun, and let me know if you come up with anything interesting!

Writing my first blog post, I felt an overwhelming desire to seek out and read the earliest posts of my favourite bloggers.

Reading old blog posts, I have decided, is a peculiar thing to do - archives are seldom explored, search engines prefer newer content, and readers are too overwhelmed by current information to seek out older information. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the digital time-travel involved in trawling through archives, and some of my observations will no doubt find application during the infancy of my own blog:

1. If you’re not famous, expect to work hard for reader engagement

Blogging is about facilitating conversations, right? Well, not for the first few months. Even the top bloggers - who were producing great content from the very beginning - wrote for a long period of time without receiving any meaningful response.

Damien Rowse’s Problogger is currently the second most popular blog according to Technorati users. But most of the first posts didn’t receive comments until a year after they were written. By my count, Damien wrote over 200 posts before readers started seriously engaging with the content (which I defined as a post receiving 5 comments within a week of posting). And even that pont was an anomaly. These days, an average post of his will receive tens of comments within hours.

This experience is by no means unique - Fred Wilson, Andrew Chen and Baris Karadogan write three of my favourite blogs, but spent their first months ostensibly talking to themselves. Not to mention what one would expect of blogs which have comments switched off, have had them switched off in the past, or which fell outside of my brief survey.

The lesson? Work hard from the beginning, even if you’re writing with minimal feedback. Realise that an audience must be built gradually, and that lack of user engagement isn’t a reflection of the quality of content (yet).

2. None of the top blogs were ever distinctly personal

Many people still see bloggers as exhibitionists and blog readers as voyeurs. While I know that this is not true, it’s tempting to think that the top bloggers originally started their publications as personal diaries.

On the contrary, popular bloggers had a prescient appreciation of the importance of demonstrating expertise, rather than discussing the minutiae of their lives . Fred Wilson and the Marginal Revolution guys are great examples of this - providing substantive content to their readers from the very beginning.

3. Longevity wins

Obviously, great content will attract readers. But it’s not easy to compete with established blogs on the basis of content alone. Indeed, much of the ubiquity of top bloggers can be attributed to prolonged commitments to their blogs.

Jason Kottke is a superb writer, who I follow with great pleasure. But his content is not entirely unique, he doesn’t serve a niche and would not be considered ‘an expert’. So why is he one of the world’s most read bloggers? Because he’s been writing superbly for over 10 years.

You may think that barriers to entry are low enough for new blogs to succeed through providing good content. But you’re going to struggle if all you’re doing is providing content as good as (or even marginally better than) Kottke’s.

The lesson? If you’re seeking a substantial following (for whatever reason), you’ll need to either find a niche, or do an exceptional job.

4. Very few blogs have moved from short-form to long-form

Perhaps not surprisingly, this was the predominant trend. Bloggers have remained generally consistent with post length and density, but started to introduce very short posts once doing so became more conventional.

This may not be a mind-blowing observation, but it does suggest that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the average reader’s attention, or at least that readers now tend to prefer shorter posts. While longer posts may have the benefit of appealing to social bookmarking communities and search engines, bloggers who have built followings around their writing have done so by decreasing post length (also presumably increasing frequency).

5. Many of the top bloggers have lost their earliest posts

It surprised me that many tech-saavy bloggers had lost early posts due to having a database wiped or a service closing down.

Robert Scoble is a striking example - he lost his first 2 years of writing when UserLand’s Manilasites service was switched off.

This should serve as yet another reminder to back up your content if you think it’s worth keeping, and to host your own blog if you want to be sure that it’ll stay up.