Friday, October 12, 2007

Oh my blog!

Remember that story, "Access to Cahill's blog will be blocked on city computers"?

It was about somebody apparently going on city dime all day to Kingston mayoral candidate Richard Cahill's blog (There even was an editorial about it).

The records the Freeman obtained for that story were acquired using Statcounter, a Web site that allows you to track who's visited you, from where, when, etc.

It is interesting, to say the least. So on Sept. 20, I decided to try it myself on this blog (surprise!)

This is a map of recent visitors:



Of course, this doesn't mean much, even if you know how to read the thing. Because you can only tell where is the geographical location of your visitors' servers. So it doesn't point to YOU, but to where your computer gets its Internet connection.

And so:

* All those hits from Pennsylvania came from the Freeman office itself, since our parent company has its computer servers there.

* I don't have any friends in Brazil, unless you count that guy who left me a note in Portuguese to check out a site for "hot young blonds."

* Same goes for South Korea, France, Canada, Mexico, "Unknown" (which is now my favorite country) and Argentina (even though I do have a friend in Argentina, and he's so crazy he actually would send me a link for "hot young blonds").

* Your tax dollars at work!: I have occasional readers in the state Assembly ("k") and in the state Senate from Delanson upstate and Wyandanch in Long Island (go figure).

* If you have Time Warner, your visit will show up as coming from Cornwall.

* People are still using AOL, and I don't know why.

* A gargantuan number of readers visit this blog while at work (I'm excused, this IS part of my job).

* You can't really be anonymous online. Everything you do leaves a recorded trail, even without Statcounter.

* My most frequent visitor is yours truly, because every time I type something, it leaves a record, so it shows as if I'm a visitor.

* My parents don't read what I do (one of my brothers does, but only to point out typos).

* I've been visited from 18 states (I'll get you one day, Utah!).

* Somebody bumped into my blog by searching for "carl rux grisha coleman."

* About 69 percent of recent visitors spend less than 5 seconds on any particular page at the time, which is disturbing.

* A good 21.5 percent of recent visitors spend more than an hour on this blog, which is even more disturbing.