NAVEL GAZING
Dean Esmay has a rather long post on blogging stats and why he doesn’t talk about them.
Among the points he makes, confirmed by early commenters there and on Bear’s site, is that Bear’s Ecosystem and, especially, his traffic rankings have some potential problems because SiteMeter isn’t very reliable as a metric as compared to internal counters.
I clearly get less “traffic” on SiteMeter than on my internal stats counter from HostingMatters. Two things, though:
1. I think my host counts every time a page is opened, whereas SiteMeter counts visits by a particular IP address and doesn’t add another one if the same IP visits again two minutes later–it just counts that as a long visit. My host also counts visits by robots and spiders, which SiteMeter appears to exclude.
2. As long as the SiteMeter error is systematic, one would think it would be a reasonable comparative measure, anyway. It at least an apples-to-apples comparison.
In a series of related posts, Oscar Jr. expands on his previous analysis of links and traffic. He says OTB is a “Blogger’s blog” because my traffic is substantially less than my linkage would indicate. Ironically, this would probably not be true if he’d done the analysis today, as I’ve moved up to #63 on the traffic rankings and #61 on the link rankings. My average traffic has gone up substantially owing to a Kevin-lanche yesterday, though, almost certainly skewing the data.
Plus, you can ban your own IP in Sitemeter where most opt not to in their host stats because it may block them from being able to comment at their own blog (I know mine does). So I’ve noticed that my host stats are going through the roof where my sitemeter stats are pretty steady and more accurate, I think.
Dean Esmay has a rather long post on blogging stats and why he doesn’t talk about them.
Hehehehehehehehehehheheheheheheh.
“He talks at length about things he doesn’t talk about.”
😉
Chuckle.
Regarding yours being a “bloggers’ blog,” at least I was prescient enough to say “at present”.