Forgive me for once more admitting to a preoccupation with my web stats. I was showing Drunk how I can tell what country, referrers urls, etc., my readers come from. I was delighted to see that some of my readers come from the other Recidivist , whose site I have recently discovered, and who writes interesting and trenchant commentary on social and political issues.
Web statistics are a strange thing. I am not sure how good any one else’s analysis is, but mine does not appear very sophisticated – of just over 10,000 visits logged, for instance, it can only analyse the Top Level Domain of 1569. But as I was showing Drunk how I could see what internet providers people who read my site use, I was somewhat surprised to see that out of these, 1 of them came from “.gov” – or, to give it it’s full title, the United States federal government agencies.
I was wondering how this US government employee found my site. I tend to Google first if you type in “recidivist”. But type in, say, “Beck”, or “Zimbabwe AND Jan Raath AND Angus Shaw”, and I am not sure that I even feature, even though I have written entries on these subjects, because, to be frank, when I Googled these search terms to check, I couldn’t be bothered to keep looking after the twentieth page of links to other sites. And, apart from the fact that this makes me wonder if I have got the hang of this whole blogging malarkey, it also means that you are not likely to just stumble across my blog if you haven’t followed a link from somewhere.
So I am left posing the question: “Was it a random Friday afternoon, when someone linked to my site from xfm.co.uk, where I posted something on their message boards about Beck, with a link to my entry on the gig I saw in June? Or did someone google “recidivist” when they read the word in a piece of legislation they were reading about the penal system?” Obviously even in the US government, people spend time messing around online, and it would be interesting to know what sites are visited from their domain.
I, of course, prefer the melodramatic and sinister possibility that the US likes to monitor web opinion, and came across my blog because they were looking for references to Menezes, or Wolfowitz, or George Galloway online. I know it’s entirely unlikely, but I enjoy the thought that I am being monitored! I have determined to write much more stuff about shopping, and food I have cooked, and music. Just to keep my imaginary online spy busy… And I will definitely not mention the time I was arrested in Paris for helping to try and bring down a foreign despot who was visiting France at the time.
Oops.
The Feds are clearly onto your online, subversive antics…do you think you could pull off an orange boiler suit?
I just use the free sitemeter stats (www.sitemeter.com) which apart from acting as a counter gives you info on your last 100 visitors (although, like with your stats, you don’t always get isp data etc, because I think a lot depends on javascript being enabled on your visitors pc).
I love looking at serach terms that have brought people to my little blogging effort; but sadly, the most common google term at the moment appears to be “Orliath’s tit pictures” … which given my sexual orientation makes my blog just about the last place you are ever likely to find pictures of Orliath’s surgically enhanced boobies *shrug*.
As for the monitoring thing, it most certainly is happening. Shakespeare’s Sister (who I link to) has posted on how a lot of her e-mails are mysteriously vanishing whenever she includes a link to ‘After Downing Street’, the US veterans campaign trying to get Bush investigated for possible impeachment … so yes, you never really know with all those .mil and .gov visitors, though I suspect most of them are just skivers doing what they shouldn’t be doing :p
So, about when you were arrested in Paris for trying to bring down that Mugabe snake …………….
I once made the mistake of mentioning ‘nuclear landmines’ .. I had a sudden rush of vistitors from North Korea. Now that was quite amusing.
pah, can’t seem to make a site counter work for my site, so i never know if anyone reads it. I feel like the tree falling in a forest.