Vanity

A while ago I started to wonder if anyone was reading my blog. Not that I'd have stopped if they weren't, but you can't help getting curious to know if anyone is reading your rants/drivel/philosophical musings so I've been tracking some basic info using Statcounter and to be honest, I'm amazed at the restuls. Now I'm hardly going to win awards for the amount of traffic on the site and I know I have a couple of regular reader who are friends of mine, one of whom is based in Hong Kong, but I have had a truly global readership so far.

Granted most of the hits are probably random (i.e. I've been lucky enough to be on the Blogger front page somewhere or linked from another blog as the 'Next Blog' link or something) but it's kinda cool to think that people in all these places might actually get a giggle out of my stuff. OK, so without people leaving comments it's hard to tell but assuming that people are reading your stuff is the basic and essential vanity of the blogger. For some reason I seem to be popular in China (probably getting crawled by the state firewalls and blacklisted as an evil capitalist!) and I can't help thinking the Peruvian, Polish and Kuwaiti hits were accidental ones but it does make the map look more impressive. All I need now is Russia, the subcontinent, the Antipodes and, the creme de la creme, Antarctica (although this might be a bit ambitious).

Oh well you never know. Africa would be good too although I suspect most people in Africa have better things to do than read the ramblings of a middle class 30-something from the UK so fair do's on that one really.

By the way, don't panic - the stats I collect are private and do not identify you. I'm only interested in seeing if I get hits, how many and where from. Believe me, working in IT you tend to be far more mindful of online privacy than most and I don't much like my data being collected so I make damn sure I can't get anyone else's.