A reader asked me today why I don't publish site visits on UNCoRRELATED.

Not because I don't want to, but because I don't honestly know--really--how many people visit the site on a daily basis. Frankly no one else knows what their traffic is either.

During UNCoRRELATED, history, I've used four different traffic counting technologies. Currently I am using both Webalizer and Site Meter and the latter reports 1/10th the visits of the former. What's going on?

Site Meter describes their methodology for counting visitors as:

Site Meter defines a "visit" as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.

One should understand that this is a completely arbitrary methodology. Its useful for comparing sites all using precisely the same methodology, but can't ever tell you exactly how many actual visitors you have to the site.

The reason is that an IP address doesn't refer to an individual reader. I have a home network that has at least two and as many as five users sharing a single IP address. If we are all reading UNCoRRELATED with no more than a half hour between visits, its counted as one visit. The same is true at my place of business--one IP address for a dozen users. The only time I can be relatively sure I have a single identifiable visitor is if I get a unique IP address that views precisely one page and then moves on elsewhere never to return in a given day.

For Dial up users, an IP may in fact change several times during an on-line session, fooling my traffic counter into thinking that a lot of different visitors are on the site when it fact its only one reader.

I do track the stats from month to month looking for trends. If visitors are 20% more than they were last month, its a pretty good, albeit not perfect indication that more people are reading the blog.

As the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Numbers are usually wrong.

It is however fascinating to look at a world map of where various visitors are requesting html from. Most are from the U.S., which make perfect sense, but there is a significant cluster in Britain and Northern Europe (where English fluency is common). Everyday we get a few from South America, China and someone who reads everyday in Turkey (hi there!).

Aside from the root page, the most commonly requested page lately is the /Miscellaneous/Miscellany/ category. I am not sure why, but I suspect its the polar bear story--am I right? Let me know in the comments what it is you are looking at precisely.

Its a little strange to see which posts capture the public interest. Big bass, bears, hogs and other animals generate a lot of views. People like big animals I guess...