One of the first things I do when I fire up the computer in the morning is to see where overnight visitors have come from. There is a mystique about these anonymous people from world cultures who have wandered into my life through the open door of the public weblog.
How did they arrive at Fragments from Floyd, and why? And what, if anything, did they carry away from the visit (on average lasting only 90 seconds) and where did they go from here?
Sitemeter will only tell me the locations of the last 100 visitors, but I usually click through each screen of twenty, musing at the names, wondering about the history of places commemorating long-past patriarchs and histories.
Jeffersonton, Virginia. Never heard of it, probably named after Thomas, and I'd hate to have to say that name fast. I wonder how the locals abbreviate it. Rural Retreat near Wytheville where we used to live became "Earl Treat". "Jeffton" maybe?
Some names are evocative: Kingfisher, Oklahoma (why that particular bird?) and Freedom, Wisconsin. (Freedom from or for what?) And so many names are obviously Native American. Okeechobee, Florida. What does that mean in the native tongue from which it was borrowed?
UK names always make me smile, often combining a village name with the name of a river. Newcastle Upon Tyne. Again, a heck of an address for an envelope, and you'd think there was a shorthand that locals use to refer to it. Maybe Nukem, you think?
Overnight while we sleep in the west, Asia and Europe is browsing. Visitors came in the wee hours from unspecified locations in Spain and Kuwait. From Vilnius, Lithuania. (I used to listen to Communist bile broadcast from Radio Vilnius on my shortwave. Now, its citizens wander by for a visit on an American rural front porch blog while I sleep.
And there's a guest from Hanoi; another from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. How and why have these anonymous browsers wandered through Fragments from Floyd? Will they ever be back?
And the others in my list of 100: I wonder what small percentage were readers versus click-fingered passersby. Some places I do see over and over again, day after day, from Switzerland, California, from a small town in North Carolina or Iowa. I haven't a clue who these "regulars" are. Should I in any way be gratified by the absolute totals of visits I have per day if there is scant interaction with the anonymous 99.99% of them?
It's a strange and vaguely more connected, superficially smaller world we live in.
There was a time early in my blogging life in 2002 and 2003 when I felt community in the much smaller blogosphere of the day. I don't sense that now in a grotesquely-bloated world of blog-noise, some of which is mine. It has become a much more solipsist exercise with an occasional, accidental sense of sharing. I'm an oddly-persistent elder-blogger who is sometimes a browser, another faceless buzzing bit of data leaving visit records in Helsinki and London while the blog-owners sleep.
Check, Virginia appears on their sitemeter pages. Hmmm. I wonder where that name came from. And who would come HERE from THERE, they ponder over coffee.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Morning Geography
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6 comments:
I check my statcounter at least once a week, and I am always amazed at the number of places around the world that I get visited from. Then I wonder why more of them don't comment!
What amazes me is how sometimes a visiter appears with a number of something like 50 past visits and I don't remember ever seeing them again.
The very nice folks from Switzerland emailed me once. I know they read Floyd blogs and come via floydva.com. I'll just looked for the email and can't find it. If I do I'll let you know the full story of why Floyd.
That first line should read.... I don't remember seeing them (before or ever).
Most mornings my sitemeter report is at the top of my email list...So naturally I get lost in the data first. The familiar place names and the unfamiliar place names...They all beg to be explored. I have learned to recognize the random Blogger visits from the Blogger Nav Bar. There are never very many of those, but they are the fun ones.
Since my traffic is nowhere near as high as I assume ya'll get each day, my geography lesson is nowhere as intense. I do often wonder though about the locations that show up time after time after time with never a comment or a "Hi how are ya". I am sure my own "lurking" past has come back to haunt me...
the internet really is amazing....but i feel the same about the connection sometimes. i recently installed a sitemeter and was amazed to see how many people were actually stopping by, as i only averaged about 7-8 comments a day. but the average length of time is only 5 seconds! i realize as my numbers and comments go up that it becomes harder and harder to repay all the visits. i still enjoy it, though, b/c mine is more a way to document my life whether people read or not. i'm horrible about journaling and getting pictures into albums...blogging is a much easier way to do that for me...and something that my son will have access to when he grows older.
Greetings from Lancashire, England! I spent a vacation in the Shenandoah Valley one year and thought it was a wonderful place to be. I like wildlife and nature, and enjoy reading your blog. Thank you.
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