22 July 2008

Analytics

I was curious about this blog: if anyone is reading it and who and where they are coming from and what I found out was quite surprising.

I installed a bit of .html code into my blog from Google Analytics. Now I know next to nothing about this type of thing, but there were instructions for a variety of blog platforms, and since mine, Blogger, comes from Google, the instructions were especially clear. I waited a couple of days and the thing spit out a report. Here is what it said:

On Sunday and Monday of this week I had 156 unique site visits from nine US states and seven different countries with 249 total page views. One guy from Germany spent almost 14 minutes on the site and this was a record: he must have been looking at pictures or something. The average time spent on the site was 2:03 which I don't think is shabby, considering all the stuff that one could be looking at. Of these, 26 were direct hits, meaning that the people who came here clicked on a link in an email or in a bookmark or typed that address directly into their address bar. The other 130 were referred hits, meaning that they clicked on a link in a website.

This latter bit surprised me, because I didn't know right off what website could have my blog listed. I looked into the report for these (this thing has all the bells and whistles) and found that almost all of the referrals came from www.pusanweb.com. After looking high and low on that site I cannot find my blog listed anywhere, but it must be there somewhere because people are clicking from it.

Why does all of this matter? It doesn't. I would have kept writing it if the analytical contraption showed that my mother was the only one reading it. This might sound a bit odd, but there have been times when writing this helped me keep it together. Sometimes it has been hard, and remembering that there is a world outside and that this is an adventure worth capturing in words has really brought me back to where I am and why. So it doesn't really matter that people in Brazil and Singapore read my blog. It just makes me feel good to know that someone is out there following along.

Note: I mainly wrote this post to piss off C-Dawge, who thinks this whole thing is an exercise in narcissism. And he's right. Hi C-Dawge!

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