I have a few of those stat thingies at the bottom of my blog. Some may call them ego meters or popularity points, which would be fair. All they do for me is confirm that there is a handful of folks sticking it out with me week to week. I don't check them all that often, but when I do, there are two things that I routinely look for.
First, I'm interested in who's coming from a direct link rather than reading me from bloglines or other feed. Not that there's anything wrong or offensive about being read via a feed - I do the same with the majority of the blogs I read, but I find a certain unexpected pleasure in knowing someone took the time to actually visit the blog to read the post and over time I've gotten to "know" some of them via their IP. Ponder that.
Second, I'm interested in the the search engine results that got someone to the site. Those results are not as titillating as what you'd find, perhaps, in Pauly's or Al's stats, for sure - mine are mostly "poker blog" - but occassionally I get one or two that throw me for a loop.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Would you care to conjur the image of the whack job person who found my humble site by plugging elephant porn into the MSN search engine?
Ewww!
