Big Brother is Watching

For those of you who have been reading my blog since the beginning, you have seen a couple of facelifts.

It started with a bunch of words on a white background.

A few months later, I found a program that let me put a colorful background behind the words.

That was followed by adding an advertisement from Amazon.com, which gave me some blogosphere street cred.

For the last month, my website has been part of a program called AdSense, where they post some rotating ads on my site, based on the subject of my most recent blog.

With all of the new blogs out there, it took more than six weeks to get approved for AdSense, which also monitors the traffic on the site.

For a stat nut like me, it is pretty cool to see how many people are visiting the site.

AdSense also monitors how many times people click on one of the ads.

I have no idea what the formula is, but if I understand this correctly, I get paid based on how many times people click on those ads.

Some days that amount is a Penny, enough to give my six-year old daughter a ride on the moving horse at the grocery store.

Some days it has been enough to buy her an Orange Juice.

But this blog is certainly not about the money, and hopefully it never will be, but I do like the fact that I am able to monitor which blogs get the most hits.

Enter Mat, with one T.

He’s the friend of a friend, who used to write a blog, and introduced me to my new favorite website.

Yes, even better than sirbacon123.com.

It’s called sitemeter.com.

Basically it's the Internet's version of big brother.

If you don't think people are watching -- guess again.

It took seconds to sign up and minutes to add the software to my website.

And for the low low low price of zero dollars and zero cents, I can now:

• See the total number of hits at sirbacon123.com, the average hits per day, the average length of each hit, the traffic prediction for the next hour, day, week and month, which website referred the reader to my site, a world map showing me where the last 100 visitors came from…

But wait, there’s more.

I can also see, pretty much to the second, who is reading my blog and which blog they are reading, at that exact moment.

Now how much would you pay?

Well, not exactly who, but sorta.

Before you think I'm some type of blogging Peeping Tom, the truth is I have no idea who you are, but with the help of sitemeter.com, I can see where many of you are from.

For most people, it lists an IP address and a location.  

It also tells me what operating system you are using, like MacOSX or Microsoft WinXP, along with what browser and the resolution of your monitor.

In some cases, I can even see if you prefer Coke or Pepsi.

I really hope this is not going to scare you away from coming back to my site, but if it does, you should be terrified to go to ANY site.

If some unemployed guy who can somehow manage to put some words together a couple of times a week can figure this stuff out, just imagine what else is out there.

But the truth of the matter is, THIS IS AWESOME!

I log onto sitemeter.com about nine million times a day to see who is reading about my life.

It is by far the worst addiction of my life, even worse than fantasy basketball.

I have absolutely NO idea who is reading my blog in Kirksville, Missouri or Mcallen, Texas or Pine Lake, Georgia or Brookline, Massachusetts.

But I thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing it.

It has been an unbelievable thrill to see people log on from the Czech Republic, Korea, Vietnam, France, India, Australia, Mexico and of course my brothers from another mother in Canada.

And that’s just in the last few days.

Sitemeter.com shows me the last 100 visitors for free.

If I want to spend $6.95 per month or $69 a year, I can monitor the last 4,000 visitors, plus some other cool stuff I’m sure.

As a guy who spent most of his childhood memorizing the stats of the great Steven Patrick Garvey, let there be no doubt, I LOVE NUMBERS.

But the numbers I’ve seen at sitemeter.com have absolutely blown me away more than the four straight years Popeye knocked in 100+ runs in the mid-70’s.

I will never forget the night that someone I have never met, and probably will never meet, gave me my first sitemetergasm.

From thousands of miles away, I monitored as a person from Citrus Heights, California spent nearly three hours on MY website reading 62 of my blogs.

Some wonderful person gave up nearly three hours of their life to read about mine.

Those are numbers that Steve Garvey could only wish for.