Surfing the web, leaving a trail

It might surprise many Internet surfers and commenters how much a slightly curious website owner knows about them.

I've always believed that I shouldn't post any thing I didn't want published in my hometown newspaper. However, I forget how much information about me is available on the Internet - whether or not I actually post.

There are several for-fee and free sites that allow me to track which pages are viewed and when, how many visitors I get, the viewer's location and the links that referred them to my website. The reports also tell me the type of browser, the length of time and divides the reports by unique visits and pages viewed. There are all sorts of reports that I don't use - or understand why I would want them.

It is cool to see that what I write has been seen - possibly read - by someone from Czechoslavakia this morning.

The images above are pictures of one report that I check most often. It shows the numbers of "hits" or visits to my blog during the last week. The top image is from this morning, the bottom is from January 8th. This website that produces the reports, Sitemeter, filters out most of the newsreader "hits." Another program shows those, inflating the numbers two or three times.

By studying the numbers and who, when and how, I keep trying to figure out how to get more readers.

I haven't found many patterns, by the way, except the "hits" seem to go up about the time midterm and end of the semester school papers might be due.

I am surprised to discover that one of the most read pages on this blog are those which deal with the subject of evolution and public policy. I post on these stories as a way of discussing the intersection of public policy and what I perceive as a bias in the science community. Few people seem to care about "Ethicists for hire," but there is a lot of interest in evolution and public policy.

One of the most frequent searches that links to LifeEthics are those on the movie, "Expelled." LifeEthics has been viewed about 12 times over the last day because someone used Google or another web search engine with the search words, "Expelled, the movie." This morning, my post from last October, "LifeEthics.org: Expelled, the movie (It's about censorship)" is the third link in a search on the US Google. One of those visits was by someone from somewhere in the United Kingdom who used the AOL and Google.uk search engines to view my page for a little over a minute, each time. They clicked on a link on my post to view the Guardian.uk article on Richard Dawkin's reaction to the movie.

There were comments yesterday on "Expelled: movie to explore politics of science" from a reader who objects to my critique of the case of one of the scientists mentioned in the press releases about the movie. This post was from August 23, 2007. That commenter and I are still having a conversation on a story about a Texas Education Agency employee who sent out an email alerting people she knew about a talk on "Creationism's Trojan Horse." Those posts were written in early December,2007 and titled, "Politics Bites," and "Texas Employees, Politics, Science."