Hello out there in readerland!
It’s funny to watch my blog stats – I get all sorts of interesting data, but none of it covers what really interests me. Note that while I believe that privacy is, in some sense, at an end (a la Earth by David Brin), and I don’t feel much compunction about having a website that also reads you, I do treasure personal private space, and I respect that of others. Oddly, the stuff I can learn about my readers gives a somewhat mechanistic picture, without the human details that I cherish, and none of it is particularly revealing of private information.
For example, I can see when someone reads all my web pages related to dating (as happened yesterday), or clicks through every link in the sidebar (also yesterday). I can get a fuzzy picture of where they came from, geographically – while I know the name of a company to which yesterday’s #1 reader was somehow connected, or from which he or she was browsing, I don’t know who it was, whether he or she works there, or why he or she might be curious about me. If it was this evening’s blind date, I don’t know how she found my last name (other than clever sleuthing, in which case – congratulations).
I can see, if I look closely, exactly how many people are pulling the RSS feeds, either what hardware they are using or which aggregation service, and – as for almost all my readers – their ISP and IP address. The bizarre thing about having all this information is that none of it is the important stuff – I don’t know what’s happening in your lives, or why you are interested in mine. I know that you’re out there, reading my posts, but I don’t know who you are. I know you’re following what I write, but I don’t get to know you. Why is that?
While, technically, I suppose it’s because I’m the one who’s writing the blog, and y’all are the folks picking through it for the interesting bits, it would help me to know which bits you find interesting.
December 12th, 2007 at 16:19
I find the dating stuff interesting because I’m 25 and new to the serious-dating world (as opposed to the, hey you’re nice, let’s hook up, and we live near each other so we might as well be official). I’m with someone special now and decided that I’m forever changed. Not in the sappy way, but in the “hold onto your butts” way because anything I thought about where my life would go is up in the air and it’s scary and not all soft and nice and fields of flowers. It means I’m going to have to change, compromise, and be strong.
I also find your ads interesting because I’ve never posted one. The guy I’m with now does fit into who I always thought I wanted. But first I had to give up on that idea. And then it happened anyway.
Leap and the net will appear, so they say.