When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I thought I was just publishing words on the internet. But it turned out to be much more than that.
It took me a month to add a hits counter to my blog. By nightfall I'd recorded 3 visitors to the site, two of whom were me. But who was the other visitor, and why had they come? I was hooked already. And, you'll not be surprised to hear, I've been keeping a careful eye on my daily number of blog visitors ever since. It's yet another method of gauging feedback on what I write (never mind the comments, count the footfall), and I smile so long as the general trend remains slightly upward.
Tracking statistics are also an extremely useful way of discovering where one's visitors are coming from. Maybe a direct hit from another blog that's linked to your latest post. Maybe the occasional arrival from another blog where you've just been added to the sidebar. But most likely a random appearance via a Google search. Ah yes, how we love to see what strange combinations of words have been leading Googlers to our door (always a useful topic for a backup post when all other inspiration fails). But it's not so useful for the Googler. They'd been trying to track down "brit oval to paddington by cab" (or whatever) and they ended up on your blog instead, disgruntled and unsatisfied. Search engines may bring visitors, but they rarely deliver long-term readers.
Stats trackers therefore vastly overestimate the number of readers your blog is getting. And this can be quite depressing. There you are celebrating getting 50 hits on your blog, but it turns out that 40 of them never meant to be there in the first place and didn't hang around when they arrived. Proper readers, ones that keep coming back for more, are like gold dust.
3b) VISITORS < VIEWERS
But there's been a change recently, and I'm left wondering whether stats tracking sites might instead be seriously underestimating the number of viewers that blogs are getting. It's RSS that's to blame - the cunning technology whereby people can read your posts without reading your blog. My viewer numbers almost double if I add in the number of people subscribed to my blogfeed , a total which positively amazes me.
Once subscribed, viewers don't have to keep checking the blog to see if anything new has been written, they can find out remotely. It's very convenient, but it can be a bit annoying for the blogger. Just spent ages tweaking your blog's layout and design? RSS readers won't notice, because they're only reading your individual posts. Just updated your blogroll? They won't spot that either, nor all of the comments that others are making on your posts. Hell, there could even be a photo of a naked vicar in your sidebar and they'd never notice. Which is a shame. RSS brings enormous opportunities, and I've become a keen user of this new functionality. But reliance on blogfeeds also cuts social ties and has started to diminish hard-won feelings of online community.
Blogging is becoming a conveyor belt churning out content, which is then reassembled and reproduced elsewhere. You may have control over what you write, but you no longer have control over how it's read. Your latest post might well reappear inside Facebook or on LiveJournal, or within some other 2.0 portal. It might be shamelessly stolen by a spam blog and reproduced without credit. And it's almost certainly popping up somewhere in an RSS aggregator like Bloglines or Google Reader, out of context and stripped of formatting, where it has to fight for attention amid a raging torrent of other very similar looking posts. Much too much to read, far too little time.
3) READERS < VISITORS < VIEWERS
Your blog is almost certainly being viewed, but is it actually being read?
, a total which positively amazes me.
