Big Brother is Watching You

"Every blog you see
every site you flee
Every page retrieved
every comment leaved1
I'll be watching you."
-The (Secret) Police

Guys like numbers. In The River Why, David James Duncan remarks on the oddity of John 21, where Jesus's disciples show their quantification propensities by counting 153 fish. Duncan writes, "This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that [the fish numbered precisely 153]....How was this digit discovered? Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting 'one, two, three, four, five, six, seven...' all the way up to an hundred and fifty and three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman's compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!"

Internet technology being what it is, there is another thing to quantify: the number of visits to a blog! A few months ago, I signed up with statcounter.com, which I highly recommend. Since I am never going to pay them for their services, I figured I at least owe them a blog entry. They have some of the coolest features I have ever seen. Many internet counters may tell you how many times your pages have been loaded on a day; for example, you might get 38 hits on a day and think blissfully to yourself, "I have 38 fans!" Unfortunately, you might not have 38 fans: it just might be that you have one particularly obsessive fan who has clicked on your page 38 times. Or, even worse, perhaps the reason your one fan reloaded your blog so many times is that they weren't reading your blog at all: they kept looking at your links, hitting the "back" button, then leaving again.

Statcounter not only tells you how many "hits" you have on a day: it also tells you how many of these hits were from different visitors, and how many of these visitors are 1st timers/returning. It tells you how long they visited a page. It tells you where that person lives! It tells you what site they visited before yours: for instance, I discovered someone had linked to one of my posts simply because I kept getting internet traffic from the same blog. It tells you what google searches brought someone to your site. Not that I care, but it even tells visitors' IP addresses and browser choices. Statcounter lets me set up a "blocking cookie" on my own computer, so that my counter isn't affected by my own visits. (Think how shaming it must be to have five hits on a day, four of which have been yourself.) Best of all, statcounter is free!

Now, statcounter only keeps this level of detail for the most recent 100 page loads--you can increase the number through an upgrade, but you have to pay for the service. I think that statcounter is most useful if you don't get many visits, because then you have something to do when virtually nobody's reading you. Sure, perhaps only three people visited your site that day, but you can spend ten minutes carefully studying them, their geographical location, and their viewing habits. Not that I would do that sort of thing, of course, because that would be obsessive.

The weirdest thing is learning what google searches take someone to a blog entry. For instance, I wrote a post recounting how, as a 12-year old, I wrote a really bad rock song about ear-piercing being sinful, along with Scriptural proof-texts. I got all sorts of hits from google searches like "piercing arguments," "Biblical reference to ear-piercing," etc. I couldn't help but feel bad for all of these people who had actually hoped for something substantial but had ended up at my blog instead. Perhaps the one I feel worst about is a person's search, "how to console someone with a death in the family," which took the person to this beauty. I never really thought about the odd weakness of google: it can tell whether certain words show up, but not whether they are serious or humorous. Also, google searches not just an individual blog entry but a whole month's archive: so, when someone googled "skit based off Ananias and Sapphira," mine was the first hit on google, because one of my blog entries used the phrase "Ananias and Sapphira" and a different entry in the same month used the word "based."

However, sometimes the google searches can make me feel touched. For instance, someone did a google search for "fully human, fully divine," and went to my site. Normally, I would feel bad about someone wanting a serious post and getting a silly one. However, statcounter lets me go to the google screen, and I saw that even before the person clicked on my site, google had excerpted the phrase "fully monkey," a key silliness signifier. I like to think that there's this unknown personage who sincerely wanted to learn some serious Christology, but found him/herself intrigued and inexorably drawn in by the siren song of the monkey. That is a high compliment indeed. Both to my writing, and to monkeys.

Having statcounter also enables you to employ some neat counter-espionage technology. Sometimes, after I visit a blog or link to it, someone--and by "someone," I mean whoever owns the blog I visited--will use their advanced tracking technology to learn that this "Leopoldtulip" guy linked to them, and they will spy on me by looking at my blog. With statcounter, it's like having a double agent spy within their ranks--several times, statcounter has told me when someone got to my site through "technorati" or a different web counter system. Who's spying on whom, buddy? You think you're so cool with your complex internet tracking capabilities, but tell me, who's ... spying ... on whom?

1.Yes, yes, I know it should be "left."