Here's a review of what people were looking for to find this weblog in previous Octobers. Some of this tells me what I should write about this year, and other parts of it tell me what fads came and went.
Ann Arbor trick or treat hours (search): Every year I try to post a complete list of trick or treat hours for the area; here's the 2005, 2006, and 2007 lists. This year if I'm ambitious I'll try to get a list of any special events by neighborhood.
Michigan spiders (search): One of the most popular October pages is a writeup I did on the brown recluse spider two years ago; a recent one on the pumpkin spider should be good too. It's not a coincidence that spiders are part of Halloween decorations!
Noguchi filing system (search): In October 2005 I wrote about the Noguchi filing system, a time-centered approach to filing and memory by a Japanese economist that William Lise had described on his translation web site. Interest spiked ever so briefly in August 2006. Subsequently Lise pulled his excellent descriptive text from the net in response to piracy of his text. The Yukio Noguchi web site is all in Japanese but may help in some way to help you reconstruct this system from his original works describing it.
Laszlo Bock, Google (search): In October 2006, Laszlo Bock was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about changes to the hiring process at Google, describing a system that was going to be more heavily quantified and measured than before. Interest in that clip peaked Jan 2007 and has been consistent. A further interview with Bock by the Yale School of Management gives few additional insights, but this interesting tidbit: he was an actor in "Showtime kinds of movies", yet there's no unambiguous credits for him in IMDB.
Book Burro (search): In October 2006, the Firefox plugin Book Burro won 2d prize in a mashups for libraries contest organized by OCLC. Book Burro watches web sites when you browse and alerts you to information about books referenced on the page, allowing you with a minimum of keyboard and mouse movement to know whether that book from Amazon is in stock at your local library. I wrote about this as part of some broader set of library focused writing at my other blog, Superpatron.
Finally, in October 2005, I wrote about the Caribou Coffee opening up down the street. It's still there, and I'm still a regular. mmm coffee...
