August 18, 2004
Is it time for a new standard 'round the Blogosphere?
In accordance with the current norms 'round the Blogosphere, the official visitation count for a blog are from the stats on your SiteMeter. I was questionable about the accuracy of their count awhile back and someone suggested I check out StatCounter. I signed up for their free service and implemented the correct code just below where my SiteMeter resides and set the counter to the number then displayed on said SiteMeter on Saturday, April 17th 2004. While I admit that StatCounter does its visitation calculations in a slightly different manner than SiteMeter, the correlation between the number of visitors as reflected by the current numbers shown discloses a major disparity. Now I agree with the formerly announced contention that, even if error laden, the errors within SiteMeter should affect all loggers equally, and that factor still makes it a reliable indicator for assessin' the popularity of one blog over another. But I have noticed an extreme rash of hourly numbers of late reflectin' zero visits to my blog for one to two hour intervals during periods of the day over this past week. Below are exhibited charts reflectin' the visitation to Read My Lips over the past week. While the numbers on StatCounter are commonly in the triple digits while recent figures from SiteMeter show visitation to be solely in the double digits, a cursory look at the two charts seems to show a similar pattern of visitation. However, note that in accordance with SiteMeter, Monday was by far the lowest visitation day of the week, whereas on StatCounter, the visitation on Monday was exactly equal to the number of visitations on Saturday and that Sunday was the lowest visitation day for the past week. I guess I am too much of a stickler for truthfulness to want to go 'bout relyin' on error filled services. I think we need to find a new standard for establishin' visitation numbers. I jes' ain't too pleased with SiteMeter.
[ADDENDUM: Regrettably, Susie* has a dilemma which trumps this, and the problem is not with her brother.]
[UPDATE: I got a rare email from someone who mentioned that SiteMeter was a free service and that the disparity between the graphs was not so great as the alarm I threw up about the ordeal. However, let me show you the following chart which purports to show the monthly visitation figures for this blog, and I challenge anyone to explain to me why it shows I had absolutely no visitors for the dates of Aug. 5 and Aug. 6.
*Did I ever tall DOH! tell ya'll that Susie was prettier than I am?
SiteMeter was broken those days. Mine did precisely the same thing--it makes an ugly pothole in my stats.
Posted by: zombyboy at August 18, 2004 04:12 PMSiteMeter is broken a lot, sometimes jes' an' hour or two, here and there. That's the reason I am squawkin' 'bout it. I know it is hard to gripe 'cause its free, but so is StatCounter and it's more consistent.
Posted by: Tiger at August 18, 2004 09:11 PM