This Here Blog Thingy

I signed up for Google Analytics in October. Since a lot of people blog for money and not for love of it, the analysis of hits is interesting to them. Since I started keeping track I have had 3005 visitors who viewed 4064 pages. They come from 43 states and 32 countries around the world. I am big in the USA, Canada, the U.K., Germany and India, and have had readers from Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Colombia, Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, Spain, Chile, Ireland, Australia, Saudi Araia, Venezuela, Norway, Serbia and Montenegro, the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Hong Kong, Bosnia and Herzogovenia, Poland, Sweden, the Phillipines, France, Denmark, and Egypt. In the United States, my month to month readers are plotted daily, down to the city they are from. It doesn't take long to figure out who is paying attention and who is not. I average between 15 and 20 readers a day. The high was sixty but I don't hit that very often. Some days I only get a couple of hits.

All of which makes this a modestly pleasing thing to do.

So what have I learned?

1. The Internet is amazing,
2. People are interested in other people,
3. Maybe people are lonesome or curious,
4. Maybe some people have too much time on their hands (Singapore? Egypt?),
5. When your relatives call and ask what you have been doing and your blog is a click away from the porn sites they have been surfing, the call is really about them. I have been pondering this insight: 90 percent of phone calls are about the caller. Should I pay for my phone or should they?
6. A Blog is unashamedly about the writer-you can't really write about somebody else's life and thoughts. But at least that is honest. So suck it up and lay that first person singular pronoun out there. Or get a dog-it is so much less offensive than the "Royal We," and less pretentious than the "Editorial We."
7. A Blog as a diary has value for the writer. Particularly for the older writer (CRS disease). The record, patterns, "the unexamined life, blah, blah, blah..."
8. It really does keep connections with some people alive without cluttering up their in-boxes.
9. It is something you can do by yourself that is not fattening or guilt-making.
10. You appreciate every reader and every hit you get-it is somehow validating.
11. When you croak, it is more noticeable than a tombstone or one of those crosses by the side of the road all weathered and leaning over.
12. It helps you plan your life so you can have something half-way interesting to write about or take a picture of, so you don't have to rely too often on statistics about your stupid blog.