Technology & MSG

Jun 25th, 2007 by Alex

I don’t feel the need to justify my writing to anyone. It’s fun for me and if anyone gets a chuckle of out it so much the better. I don’t understand the term “comment whoring.” Sometimes I wonder if people think the same way I do. Ellipsis? Question mark? What other way do I have to indicate that?

I don’t expect people to step up and comment. These days it takes balls to make your opinion known online, even if attributed to a screen name or handle. I admit that I do prefer comments that have some intelligence behind them; I’m not talking Rhodes scholars or MENSA inductees, but I’d settle for the B+ writings of a sixth grader instead of some of the texting-like gibberish or blatant flames that I receive.

I suspected that there were more lurkers out there, so I asked lurkers to comment. It didn’t work. Big shocker. So then out of curiosity (both about readership and after setting up AdWords for a clinet) I started running Google Analytics on my blogs. The relatively small number of visitors wasn’t suprising, but the fact that 74% of all visitors come in from search engines was. The majority of visitors come from search engine queries. That’s crazy, although it helps explains why only 12% of visitors actually return to the site and why 85% of them only spend between 0-10 seconds on.

I’m sure some of this data is prone to error, but even so Google Analytics is pretty damned cool. It does a fair bit of correlation of referrer and visitor data that makes seeing certain trends a lot easier. It’s a must if you run AdWords, but I like it on the blogs to find out about time that visitors spend on the site; there’s very little increased time for pages to load and the page isn’t marked by some little stat image or link.

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11 Responses to “Justification? I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Justification!”

on 25 Jun 2007 at 12:37 pm1anonymouscoworker

And some of us just read by RSS.
on 25 Jun 2007 at 2:33 pm2Alex

ACW: I get a good — if not close-to-complete — idea of RSS readers from FeedBurner. It is harder to correlate RSS-based commenters from RSS-based lurkers, although now that Google has acquired FeedBurner I would hope that it would be integrated into Google Analytics.
on 25 Jun 2007 at 4:08 pm3DJ

In regards to the RSS, the web based readers (Google Reader, FeedRinse, etc.) only hit the feeds a certain amount of times regardless of how many users are subscribed to the feeds (based upon my knowledge of their implementation so far).
on 25 Jun 2007 at 4:33 pm4Alex

DJ: Most aggregators are good about reducing traffic to the server by only requesting once in a while, but the better ones include a subscriber count as part of the User Agent string. This allows a good sense of how many subscribers; not exactly, but close is better than nothing.

GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 5 subscribers)"

GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 23 subscribers; feed-id=1234567890)"

GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 200 28022 "-" "NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 10 subscribers)"

GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 200 22907 "-" "LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for http://syndicated.livejournal.com/technology_msg/ ; 5 readers)”

Granted, these subscribers aren’t included in my counts from FeedBurner since they’re hitting me directly (versus hitting FeedBurner’s version of my feed)… but the technology is the same.
on 25 Jun 2007 at 7:56 pm5Claude

For what it’s worth, I guess I’m considered a non-commenting lurker because I usually read your blog through Blogtimore, which isn’t firewalled out at work.

In addition to the stuff that Typepad offers, I use Sitemeter to see where people are coming from.
on 26 Jun 2007 at 5:01 pm6Alex

Claude: I’ve had a few people mention that WebSense blocks my blog. I wonder if they block iGoogle. A know of several folks that read the full text there. Not that it helps the commenting situation.
on 26 Jun 2007 at 11:56 pm7danielle

Hi Alex. I guess I’m delurking now, although I wasn’t really lurking, b/c I didn’t know of your blog until you recently commented on mine (thanks btw. Is that comment whoring? I appreciated your take on socially conscious movies.)

I check in with statcounter occasionally, but I think the same handful of people read and comment on my blog. I happen to use Google Reader.

The only thing that I did, which increased my comments, was post on what an unfaithful bastard my ex was, but I wouldn’t recommend that to everyone.
on 27 Jun 2007 at 4:20 pm8Alex

Danielle: Having recently discovered Blogtimore, I’ve started reading a lot of new (for me) blogs. I comment a lot but don’t expect people to return the favor; not comment whoring unless you’re inviting/expecting a response, I think. Socially conscious movies? Forgive me, but where was that?
on 27 Jun 2007 at 4:39 pm9danielle

Here re: the movie John Q.
on 27 Jun 2007 at 4:41 pm10Alex

Danielle: Oh jeez, that was only four days ago! I don’t recall the last couple days being so stressful, but I find it sad that I couldn’t remember that.
on 28 Jun 2007 at 7:24 am11Johnny

On the other hand, sometimes unwanted comments ruin blogging
One of my “anonymous colleagues” basically harassed me (dozens of comments a day for a week) last summer over not explaining in detail my exit from academia, and he/she likes to return every week or so to give me shit for not liking Carbondale, a town which basically sucks [and hard] next to Baltimore, LOL.