Friday, January 26, 2007

Big Blue Brother is watching

Today, when I should have been doing some housework, I finally got around to adding a Site Meter to this blog.

I hadn't really felt a pressing need to do so - I used to have counters on both my "Number 96" and Geocities' "Star Trek" home pages but, as the suppliers abandoned them over time, I never replaced them. But I was still a bit (well, a lot) curious as to who was visiting this blog site (and I'd begun realising that most visitors never left actual messages or sent emails, but that didn't mean that they hadn't visited, enjoyed, or returned for more another day). I was also wondering how often people were regular readers, and/or how they found me in the first place. Other bloggers keep asking me if I know my stats, and it was kinda embarrassing (and a bit Luddite) to just shrug.

Well, it's paid off already. There's a cool world map facility and it shows from where on the globe people are reading you. Now, at this point, I knew the only reader was me, having only just uploaded the site meter seconds earlier - and there I was, a little yellow dot on Sydney, Australia - but then a little red dot lit up in the USA! Following back using the clickable tools, I discovered that there was a hot link from IDW Publishing's site, who'd found my brief review of their new "Next Generation" comic. So within only a minute of placing the site meter, I already knew that people could/would be finding "Have Phaser" that way.

So the housework can just keep piling up now, 'cos this is fun! Happy Australia Day!

1 comment:

Therin of Andor said...

This is fascinating. My world map has dots all over it now, and there is a link from Bloglines that shows up, mentioning that it's a regular update to the rss feeds. So maybe they do register?