Head Tale

With the big increase in traffic to this blog because of my writing about the NDP leadership race (sorry everybody who comes here for library & technology related stuff – less than a month till I'm back to that beat), I thought it might be interesting to see some of the search strings that are bringing people here.  I only looked at my May stats though I'm sure that you'd see a similar array for the last couple months since I started writing about the leadership campaign.

Obviously, there were all kinds of results which were variations of any of these terms: “ndp”, “leadership”, “saskatchewan”, “race”, etc. 

“Ryan Meili” and “Dwain Lingenfelter” each had tons of hits as search terms – I didn't count but would say it was probably neck and neck, maybe with a slight edge to Ryan.  I saw “Yens Pedersen” a couple times (and “Shea Pedersen” as well ) but no results for “Deb Higgins”. (Note to self: write more about Deb Higgins!) 

“Obama meili librarian” was actually searched for a couple different times which
kinda surprises me – could more than one person have remembered that
I'd done a blog post about the similiarities between Ryan and Obama
and that I was a librarian?  Oh, speaking of Obama, I can add another
similarity to my list of those similarities – I didn't know this
before but apparently Ryan spoke at the NDP convention a couple years
ago – echoing how Obama introduced himself to the Democratic party
with his speech at the 2004 DNC convention.)


Some other one-offs which probably give a pretty good indication of what's on people's minds out there (or at least where it intersects with the things I've written)…
“Ryan Meili nuclear”
“membership northern Sask”
“CBC news Saskatchewan NDP leadership”
“lingenfelter blog”
“saskatchewan NDP blogs”
“lingenfelter membership scandal”
“lingenfelter facebook”
“dwain lingenfelter memberships may 2009”
“dwain lingenfelter first wife”
“facebook faceoff meili”
“ryan meili wife”
“link saskatchewan ndp”
“waterhen gate lingenfelter”
“the jurist lingenfelter”
“saskatchewan ndp membership list”
“reliable property management saskatchewan”
“ryan meili arrested”
“youtube ryan meili”
“yens pedersen grandstanding”
“Tommy Douglas thousand member button” 

I want to write a bit more about that last search string because when I saw it, I had no clue what it meant and it was so different than the other types of queries I was getting, my curiosity was piqued. 

I looked all over the web trying to find what this was about but couldn't find anything even though there are tons of sites dedicated to Tommy Douglas, his legacy, his quotations, his policies and so on. 

I finally let it go last night around midnight and was planning to come into work today and go back to the librarian's best friend – real books! – to see if they would provide any clues.  But then, while doing a web search this morning for the different candidates (I wanted to see if my assertion yesterday about Ryan Meili having more photos on Flickr than any other candidate would also hold true for YouTube videos), this clip popped up, having just been uploaded a couple days ago.

The Bob Hale Report into Waterhen Gate (I suspect he's not going to call it that in his report ) was supposed to be submitted late yesterday but I don't think it's been revealed whether it will be fully made public, released with some of the details blacked out or withheld completely.  But in light of the confirmed purchase of 1100 memberships for everyone on two reserves near Meadow Lake by Dwain Lingenfelter's campaign, this clip is pretty damning. 

(Frankly, it's hard to believe that Tommy Douglas and Dwain Lingenfelter are part of the same party sometimes…and I guess depending on the year and the location, maybe that's not so far-fetched after all?)