One of the benefits of running blogs is the ability to gather traffic statistics and spot emerging trends. The popularity of an article is an interesting information, but my favorite is the key phrases in search engine referrer URL. The key phrases tell us what people were looking for when they ended up on the site.

This month, “Facebook application spam and how to block it” is the most viewed page on this blog, surpassing the apparently very useful mod_proxy tip, the always popular Openoffice outline mode and even the American craze for that French soldier in Afghanistan.

This month also, “block facebook quizzes” and all variations thereof account for an overwhelming majority of search engine referer key phrases on this blog.

I had personal and anecdotal data about the flood of obnoxious simplistic Facebook personality tests, but now I have numbers to back it up.

I predict a bright future for the One-Click Quiz Blocker Facebook application : it is the easiest way to make the newsfeed clean and useful again. It does what it says – it just works and it takes just one click : a real pleasure compared to my former obsessive-compulsive habit of systematic manual blocking (about five hundreds in three years…).