Readers n writers

Years ago a colleague suggested that the next time I was at ANU that I go to the library and borrow my PhD thesis so it would have at least one entry in the borrowed sheet attached to the inside cover. I resisted the temptation, largely because it struck me as being pretty silly to borrow something you already had a copy of and of which you were roundly sick to death.

It is something of this urge, "hey is anyone listening?" that prompted me to monitor web pages, blogs to get a sense of visitors, repeat folk (assuming a domain name entry flags a kind of uniqueness), one offs etc. So I find myself doing what I opted not to do so many years ago, checking to see who the heck is at least clicking on this page. Whether they read it or not is entirely another matter and what is conveyed to them when they do read it is equally mysterious. One needs a little mystery in one's life.

It is an odd and largely misrepresented statistic about web writing, "the number of hits", but it provides the writer with at least some sense that there are anonymous "clickers" out there whom, for whatever reason, are drawn to do some clicking on one or more of your pages. Actually, given the distribution and readership of many academic journals, I probably enjoy a wider readership here than via "the stuff that really counts".