(November 28, 2005)
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Many people are apologetic about checking Sitemeter and Technorati, as if that was something to be revealing of vanity and to be embarassed about. But those two are essential tools in the conversation.
You have to be pretty good, big, and popular to have more than 1% of visitors actually leave a comment. Don't expect most of the responses to your posts to occur on your blog's comments threads. I feel that many newbies think this and give up blogging way too early in the game, in dissappointment when nobody leaves any comments.
Most of the conversation in the blogosphere is not within a blog (post-to-comments) but between blogs (post-to-post, or rather blog-to-blog-to-blog-to-blog...).
Without Sitemeter and Technorati you are standing on the soapbox and yelling into the wilderness. Your blog is your mouth. Sitemeter and Technorati are your ears - without them you cannot hear the responses.
Perhaps you want a monologue. But if you don't, if you actually want feedback, it is these two tools that will provide it to you. So don't be ashamed to use them.
And also leave your Sitemeter visible to visitors as that encourages meta-conversations and quicker inclusion of newcomers into your blogging community. When seeing a blog for the first time, I often check the sitemeter referrals (if possible) to see who links to this person, to what individual posts, and why. It quickly gives me the idea what sub-blogosphere that blog belongs to and if I am going to be interested in following that blog in the future (check my blogroll - I added a few new ones lately)
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I'm with you on that!
I perhaps even spend too much time stalking those sites ;)
I've got mad skulkers. Back when I first published the Hitler or Coulter quiz I got about 400k page views in a month, and 80k the next. The most comments I got? About 17 on a single post (and that a bunch of trolling). I put on sitemeter two weeks ago because I want to see the kinds of locations and unique visitor stuff that technorati and my hosting server's data don't provide.
I only wish people would comment more because when I talk about science I'm always worried about clarity. Statistics show you how many people have looked, but nothing about what they've taken away. And since the election I need to offer something other than snarky jibes at Republicans if I want to keep people coming. I'm thinking about switching to denialism-rebuttal.
I look at Sitemeter about once a day and Technorati about once a month or so.
I do it mainly to find out what audience my blog is reaching and who's discussing it elsewhere. I've found links to me in forums and the like and even discovered that a Canadian Museum's site links to one of my articles on Egyptian Chariots. Sitemeter also lets you know when a fellow blogger has commented on your post, allowing you the opportunity to join the conversation elsewhere. I even discovered one of my posts was being talked about at Seed's private forum! :)
But, the most important thing is that it keeps me motivated to write since I know that my traffic is there and my posts are reaching someone. Without Sitemeter, I'd never know.