Monday, February 28, 2011

I've dropped my flag counter

It was amusing to see the number of nations whose citizens apparently visited my blog. At the end, the count had reached 171 countries. But I've never been particularly confident in the authenticity of all these visits, and I have the suspicion that certain visitors were dropping in merely to search for new flags to add to their personal collections. I've never bothered to look into how they actually go about this quest from a practical viewpoint, but I'm convinced that this business exists. So, I decided to drop my flag counter. In its place, I've reinstalled a simple site meter… just to be able to check, from time to time, that Antipodes still has readers.

5 comments:

  1. What disappointment, no more flag collecting here? *smile*

    Now that is something new to me, that visitors collect flags and not the other way round.

    Welcome to Sitemeter, I have the same.
    No idea if it works. I never bothered looking, until someone tipped me off that the "referring" links could be quite interesting. assuming one has nothing better to do. I catch myself doing just that, every now and then. Ah, the depth of one's curiosity!

    Cheers,
    Merisi

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  2. I had always imagined that most readers of my blog would be fellow-Australians. After all, I started this blog primarily to inform various friends and relatives in Australia of my daily activities and preoccupations. Curiously, I soon discovered that my biggest readership was American, but I have no idea of the identity of these individuals. And France and Australia have always been more or less equal, in second place, but a long way behind the USA.

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  3. I wonder how many of the Americans are actually bots and other internet crawling beasties.

    I know that CPanel tries to syphon them off so they don't interfere with the stats of visits by real people but I don't think they catch them all by any means.

    It will be interesting to learn how Sitemeter goes for you.

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  4. At the end of the day,
    a blog is just a blog
    and all it has to do is give
    the writer/blogger space to think aloud.

    I know there are blogs
    that are for-profit, so to speak, and I
    consider them commercial and
    in a league of their own.
    For them, visitor numbers are important.

    The New York Times recently carried an article
    about one of the most successful bloggers
    out there, raking in tens of thousands of US Dollars
    a month. They entertain millions of people, and that is all well as well, if you ask me.

    For me, blogging is sheer fun,
    my only challenge is to see
    how long I manage to allow myself
    once a day having some fun with my images,
    lest I forget that I love photography.

    Cheers,
    Merisi

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  5. Merisi: Thanks so much for that fine declaration, which reads like a sort of Blogger's Credo. I'm pleasantly surprised that my brief announcement of the disappearance of my pretty flags has given rise to pertinent reactions from Annie and yourself.

    I've always been motivated by the notion, as you put it, of a "space to think aloud". And the blog is a published (indeed public) entity for the simple reason that the blogger believes in the likely existence of others, out in the wide world, who might be interested (or intrigued, amused, concerned, etc) by this expression of the blogger's thoughts.

    Often, in my technical posts evoking scientific themes (inspired by the works of great writers such as Dawkins, Pinker, etc), I exploit the blog with the explicit intention of seeing to what extent I can succeed (or not) in the presentation of stuff that I myself look upon as fascinating but rather complex. Generally, I find that, after a few more or less mediocre attempts at this kind of expression, I end up getting a better feeling for how to get the message across. At that level, I must admit that I'm frankly exploiting the blog to experiment.

    We're familiar with the phenomenon of novels and serious books that are published with the primary goal of being sold in huge quantities. At the other end of the scale, there are (or used to be) slim volumes of verse, brought out almost solely for the poet's personal pleasure. I see the raison-d'être of a blog as lying somewhere in between these two extremities.

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