I went deep into the bowels of the Internet today.

Okay maybe I didn’t go that deep. But I made it down as far as Google Labs. For me that’s like spelunking into the Bat Caves of the Cyber Geeks.

I went there because I was searching for a hot blog topic for today’s post.

You see, I had a really busy weekend. Frankly I was exhausted. I couldn’t think of a dad-blamed thing to write about for today’s post. So I thought, “Hey, you can find anything on the Internet. I’ll just look up something hot.”

So I went to IE (that’s Internet Explorer, for anyone who just left Planet DOS), and typed Hot Topic into the Search box.

And lo and behold, all sorts of links popped up. Including one article called–yes–How to Find Hot Topics to Write About.

The article sent me to a site called Google Labs, where you can select Google Suggest, type in a search phrase, and find out what trends people are currently searching for, all over the world.

So I did a few searches. And the results were a bit disheartening. Here’s a sampling of the results with Google’s “trend temperatures”:

Selena Roberts and A-Rod (Volcanic)

Georgia teaching candidates must prepare for the GACE exam before they are able to accept a position in any public school (On Fire)

Obama Press Conference (Spicy)

Cockapoos (Medium)

Grammy fashion (Mild)

I was hard pressed to turn any of these topics into something writing-oriented, however. But then I stumbled onto Google Suggest’s Search Trends feature, and typed in “How to Write.” That’s when I hit paydirt.

It turns out that in the last twelve months, the most-searched-for article about writing fiction on the Internet was How to write a Bestseller by Maeve Binchy.

Maeve Binchy is one of my personal icons. And this article about her is a gold mine. I feel lucky to have dug it up. It’s…hot.

It turns out that Maeve, who has sold a gazillion bestsellers, has just published a how-to book about how to write bestsellers. It’s called The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club (published by Orion). According to the article by John Spain, the book evolved from a writing course that Maeve contributed to at the National College of Ireland in Dublin.

Aside from fiction, the number one most-searched-for writing article overall was one about how to write…iPhone applications.

No surprise there. Those writers are probably already making a bazillion dollars without writing any books at all. (That’s BAH-zillion, since our zillions are getting inflated these days by TARP economics).

And that thought leaves me cold.