A lot of bloggers are concerned about stats. When I first looked at my stats, I was amazed at how much information it looked like there was about the numbers of people who accessed this blog and clicked around. (Well, first I was depressed at the low numbers, but then I was amazed at the amount of items that supposedly can be tracked.)
But note that I said “access” and not “read,” because that’s another thing entirely. As blogging sage Dave Winer has noted,
It would be interesting to do a study to see if people can tell you what a blog post said some short interval after reading it. Something like the SAT, for blog readers. I bet the numbers would be astonishingly small.
I think that’s especially true of the hard-core blog readers, those who scan over 100 blogs a day — and that’s a large number of people, in the blogosphere. (Mea culpa!)
As Dave points out, stat numbers don’t equal readers. But it’s also true that stat numbers don’t even equal the real number of people looking at your site. The problem with stats is that you have to do some thinking to really understand them. The numbers, by themselves, don’t mean much.
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