Sitemeter, thoughts regarding.

I added the Sitemeter thing to this site a few weeks ago, just to see how much traffic I was actually getting. After blogger changed to this new interface, commenters to this place sure dried up. I wasn't sure that anyone was actually reading. But then, that isn't really the point of this blog. I am perfectly aware that this is about a fourth or fifth tier blog, and I don't do much (although there are a few posts) in the way of original thinking or reporting. Still, I was interested to see what was actually going on.

I did get a big bump for a while from the New Year's "Best of the bloggers" link from Jon Swift. That was neat to be in a list with some VERY good blogs. That lasted about two weeks. I get all sorts of hits for people obviously searching for something specific. (I was a bit alarmed when I saw that someone in Iran was actually reading my post about the possibility of the U.S. bombing his/her country. Just imagine, they were using me to get some information! Scary....) Fractals remains high on the search list, for some reason. That particular post is not much more than a cool picture.

I am very confused, however, about why 90% of the hits I get register as 0.00 as the time spent on the site. Someone clicks in and decides in less than a second they aren't interested? That's surprising. Jeez, you made the effort to click through. At least, look around for 15 seconds to see what's here. And it doesn't really jive with the overall average time that people spend on the site. So, I don't know how to intrepret that.

But here is the thing that I found amazing. Although I knew this kind of information was available, it took me by surprise about the information I can see immediately about each and every person who looks in. I can see the location. I can see the web access you are using. I can see what kind of operating system you are using and what kind of monitor you have! That's pretty scary. And that's just what is being presented to me, in whatever sorted fashion I would like! I have no idea what else people can get if they do a little digging.

It makes me not want to every look in on anything on the web again. Especially at work.