I am Big Brother

Although I vowed in a November post (Blog site counters—or spyware?)  that I wouldn’t use Sitemeter here, not long afterwards I added it to this blog. It’s the little green box at the bottom of the screen.

The information that Sitemeter provides was just too alluring. Among its many features are:

• a world map that shows the location where this blog’s readers were the moment they looked at it;
• which posting(s) they looked at;
• how long they looked at the posting (it’s disappointing to see that many readers only look at this blog for “0 seconds,” although that seems humanly impossible);
• the search terms they used to get to it; and
• the referring web sites that sent them here.

In case you're wondering why you don't see all of these things when you look at Sitemeter, I’ve blocked access to this info to the outside world.

Through Sitemeter’s World Map feature I see that in April alone I’ve had anonymous readers from more than eight countries including Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Indonesia and India. (However, to be perfectly honest, many of the readers from other countries account for the “0 seconds” searches.) This is something I never achieved in my days as the publisher of a very small magazine. I had a few foreign subscribers, but not from such a breadth of countries. However, one might argue that my magazine subscribers really wanted to read the product; it was not something they just happened to click on, or which showed up in a list of search results. They actually paid for it, including the additional cost of international postage.

Sitemeter’s “By Referrals” feature has shown me which web sites have linked to my blog. This is something that cannot be easily found with a Google search, and which other bloggers seem to do quietly on their own. (I’ll list these in a separate post someday since I’d like to acknowledge and thank them).

It’s also through Sitemeter that I’ve discovered that I may never live down the “Beautiful Poem” I wrote on poetry.com—someone searching for “poems on flatulence” found my blog posting about that silly submission.

But Sitemeter gives me a little too much information sometimes. If a friend from Wyoming told me that he or she looks at my blog, I’d know they are lying—the Sitemeter World Map shows no readers from Wyoming. I try not to use Sitemeter to spy on people I know who may have looked at my blog, though sometimes I discover it accidentally.

The too-much-information category would also include details on what kind of computer system the person was using (Mac or Windows), the names of businesses and organizations in whose computers the person typed the search (if they didn't do it at home), and what their Internet provider is. The worst example of this is that I know that in April, someone at a specific YMCA in a specific town in Connecticut searched for “HBO real sex lick it” and wound up looking briefly at my essay, On getting free HBO for a month.

Sitemeter is quietly gathering all this information to use as I wish. I won’t use most of it. All I'm really curious about is how people find this blog. But I wonder, as I said in my previous post, who else might be gathering and looking at such information and for what purposes they might use it.  Perhaps there is a hidden cost to so much free information on the Internet, especially when it's being distributed by sinister or greedy people.

Can a writer be attention-shy and successful?

While waiting for my son on Sunday afternoon, I tried to make a short video of myself using my new (cheap) Flip camcorder and found I had nothing to say when the camera was pointed at me.

How can a person who proclaims herself to be so visual and verbal be so shy when it comes to presenting herself in person?  Aim a camera at me or have me stand up and share my thoughts in a crowd and my mind freezes, but I'm able to pour words onto a page without any hesitation, whether spontaneously or on-cue. I can more easily shape my thoughts with my fingers than my mouth.

I'd thought about creating a video for YouTube where I would read some of my musings and link to my blog, just to garner more traffic to the site. Given my discomfort at being taped or photographed, I'm obviously not going to be any kind of visual media star. I am uncomfortable being the center of attention. I prefer being on the sidelines, tucked into a corner, scribbling, or speaking among friends, in a lively give-and-take.

Would I really want to garner a lot of traffic to this site? Perhaps I would feel more shy about writing a few paragraphs of whatever was on my mind if I knew, right away, 5,000 people were waiting to devour it. The words would have too much weight, then; I'm not sure I could get them out. When I write blog posts now, it is to a quiet, unseen audience. It is the writing itself that is the focus, the joy of getting the words out and shaping ideas, without any need to persuade or influence.

Yet, I don't want to end up like women who have kept their thoughts in notebooks that are tossed into the fire or sent, unread, to the dump after they die. Is there a middle ground here? Perhaps to be just a little bit read, by a wise and selective few or by a small crowd of friends?

Mainly I write these blog posts so I will have a place to store my thoughts, which won't disappear if my hard disk crashes or my house burns down. And also so I will write something at least once a week; otherwise, the time would probably slip by and I wouldn't write anything down.

So, why should I expect readers to seek out my small musings when this is really no more an electronic version of my writer's notebook? I don't have the answer for that right now.

Blog site counters—or spyware?

I used to have Sitemeter installed on this blog, rather than just the simple blog counter I’m using now, but I uninstalled it after only a few weeks. I still use Sitemeter on my Quotes About Creative Women (QACW) blog and have enjoyed seeing that that blog has found readers in India, South Africa and the United Kingdom, even while reader numbers were in the low 40s (that’s not 40,000 but just plain old 40).

I hardly check the Sitemeter icon on the QACW blog because I don’t go on it every day. (That’s because I usually spend half a day a month finding quotes and loading them onto QACW, and post-dating them so that one automatically publishes each week.) Even when I do look at the blog, I mostly forget about that little green icon for Sitemeter at the bottom of the page. Since I'm not writing the material, I don't have as much ego invested in it, I guess.

But I go on this blog more often. And when Sitemeter was on it, I checked it to see if friends who said they would read this blog had, in fact, read it. There’s a function on Sitemeter that lets you click on “Recent Visitors: By Location.” This brings up a page where country of origin appears in the first column, as a small flag icon and country name (which is why I knew that someone from S.A., India and the UK had looked at my quotes blog), and a more specific “Location” is listed in the second column. Through this function, I’ve discovered the blog also has had readers from South Carolina, Illinois and Canada.

Even more specific is Sitemeter’s “Recent Visitors: By Details” function. This brings up a page that lists domain name, visit time and visit length. This offers a little more detail than I want. For instance, most people have visited the QACW site for 0 seconds—not very reassuring. Obviously, most of QACW readers have stumbled upon it by accident, either through “Next Blog” or some chance Internet search and have declined to stay.

I’m not sure why I need to know how many are (or who is) reading my blogs, but I can't bring myself to erase the counters. They are addictive. In anxious moments I scan them to see if the numbers are going up. Even a small increase (more than five), has kept me going another week on my lesser-read blogs.

So, I'll keep them for a while longer. Yet I wonder if the information on who is reading what is being gathered somewhere, by some organization, trying to predict consumer spending/reading habits or, worse, political affiliations and grievances. I worry, then, that these are tools on more than one level and that this and other blogs could be conduits to information gathering in some other place. Such tools are free, but I wonder what price we might all, ultimately, pay for them.