Instant Feedback on State of the City

I’m working on a long post about the Mayor’s State of the City address last night, but I don’t think I’ll get it up before the end of the workday today. In the meantime, you can read about it in the Chronicle or the Trib. If any readers attended, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

We don’t have fancy online polling to rate local speeches, and the Trib no longer has comments on their articles, so there’s no obvious to way to gauge Oaklanders’ reaction to the address. Personally, I find that looking at the search engine terms that lead to this blog is often a good way to measure what’s on people’s minds. I just took this snapshot of today’s top ten searches.

3 Responses to “Instant Feedback on State of the City”

1. Dogtown Commoner says:

   January 15, 2008 at 3:38 pm

   And how does that compare to other days, just out of curiosity?
2. V Smoothe says:

   January 15, 2008 at 4:44 pm

   Some variation of “recall Dellums” shows up on my top 10 most days. Those have been increasing in frequency lately. But the only other time I’ve had one thing dominate the search terms like this was right around the time Flora opened, when every search was some variation of “flora oakland” for like a week.

   Usually, the top search is simply “a better oakland,” but the list will cover a variety of topics. If something controversial is happening at Council, I’ll get a lot of hits related to that, but there doesn’t seem to be a hot topic at the moment (at least not one that I’ve written about). Here’s yesterday’s list, which is pretty representative (in order of popularity):

   abetteroakland
   flora restaurant oakland
   oakland most violent city
   recall dellums
   flora oakland
   recall ron dellums
   “v smoothe” oakland blog
   Nancy Nadel
   maya dillard-smith
   Crime Statistics for Oakland CA
3. Moschops says:

   January 16, 2008 at 2:40 am

   Well you are #1 on the Google hit parade for “recall dellums” – of more interest might be the number of search hits on those terms that you get each day. While doing that Google search I noticed there is an actual recalldellums.com website now coming in fourth place – and that isn’t even operational yet (the domain was registered June last year so they are taking their own sweet time).