The Site Meter Blues

Often times writers are thought of as lonely, insecure, losers who are too socially awkward to hold down jobs in occupations that require interaction with other human beings. While we may never know if that is true or not (the writers won’t look us in the eye to confirm or deny this), I think we can all agree that bloggers certainly do fit that description, except they are paler with vacant eyes and carpal tunnel caused by caffeine shakes.

All that to say that many bloggers long for approval and love. And it is that desperate cry for attention that was the reasoning behind the invention of the site meter. Site meters, the online equivalent of class president elections, are an accurate and unbiased way of measuring your worth as a human being. Some bloggers have millions of hits, or “love clicks,” a month registered on their site meters. While others such as myself just have one or two from their editor checking to see if the blog is still there.

My editor is always coming up with new ways to improve the blog. lately she has been on me to change the color. But to be honest that’s kind of like repainting your living room to get more guests to come to a home that nobody knows about. So I figured letting her put the site meter on would be a painless and work free change that would satisfy her.

Site meters are interesting in the aspect that they are kind of like reverse stalking. You can not only see how many people are viewing your page but also how long they were reading it, where they are from, and the referring page that brought them there.

For instance if you were to click on the site meter icon on the right at the bottom of this page you would notice around 110ish (at the time of this writing) hits. Once there you can look at the location of those hits and what they were doing online. For instance, visitor #102 is from Lexington, KY and they found the site because they googled the search words “seat belt chimes is gay.” Similarly visitor #109 googled the phrase “platypus car chimes.” In this manner we get visitors from all over the globe, like Kenya, China, and France accidentally arriving at this blog.

But what you don’t see a lot of is google searches for “best site in the world,” or “excellence in writing” or even “James Browning.” I did recently discover that my friend, CJ Casciotta found the page while googling his own name because of an article where I mentioned his concert.

While the site meter may at first appear to be interesting, the novelty soon wears off when you realize that nobody reads your blog and those that do aren’t doing it on purpose. It’s kind of like in Jr. High, when you somehow stumble across the diary of that person that you have a huge and potentially fatal crush on. You open it up and read only to find that they are not into you at all. Not only that but those times of interaction with you that meant so much… they just wanted to know more about platypus car chimes.

So even some may find all of this discouraging, I have learned to live with the knowledge that I personally know all 3 of my readers and that my mother isn't one of them. In a way this frees me up to do whatever I want, like make some of these links go to random places just because I know nobody is checking them.