Yesterday, at 9:28:23 PM the eyes of the 100,000th visitor to Divided We Stand United We Fall fell upon this humble blog. Or, at least, so said sitemeter. The Dividist has absolutely no doubt that this was not our actual 100,000th visitor, as the Dividist has no confidence whatsoever in sitemeter's count. The fact that the visitor count in the sitemeter bug in the lower left corner does not match the sitemeter count on the detailed sitemeter list contributes to this lack of confidence. Yeah. I know. Whatever. Let's roll with it.The Dividist has periodically taken note of these benchmarks, if for no other reason to remind himself of just how truly pathetic the DWSUWF traffic levels are when considered in the pantheon of political blogging giants. We last noted a visitor benchmark with our 50,000th visitor on May 2, 2008. Before that visitor 25,000 and visitor 10,000 caught our attention.
This exercise in blogospheric navel gazing also serves as an excuse to periodically explore the advances in google technology and commensurate erosion of privacy in the blogosphere. So, what do we know about visitor 100,000?
Visitor 100,000 lives or works in Carville, Louisiana, uses Cox Communications as his ISP, has an older PC running the Windows NT OS, and browses the web with I.E. 7. He either does not keep his computer up to date with current browser technology or is using a company PC locked down on this configuration. I say the visitor is a "he" as he found the blog by way of an image search for Maria Bartiromo. The image on the right is the very one that pulled him to the post "Markets, Economy, Gridlock, and Maria Bartiromo." This, in and of itself, is yet another confirmation of the wisdom of "Rule 5" of R.S. McCain's five rules on "How to get a million hits on your blog in less than a year." :Rule 5) Christina Hendricks
Or Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman or Sarah Palin bikini pics. Rule 5 actually combines four separate principles of blogospheric success:
- A. Everybody loves a pretty girl -- It's not just guys who enjoy staring at pictures of hotties. If you've ever picked up Cosmo or Glamour, you realize that chicks enjoy looking at pretty girls, too. (NTTAWWT.) Maybe it's the vicious catty she-thinks-she's-all-that factor, or the schadenfreude of watching a human trainwreck like Britney Spears, but no one can argue that celebrity babes generate traffic. Over at Conservative Grapevine, the most popular links are always the bikini pictures. And try as I might to make "logical arguments" for tax cuts, wouldn't you rather watch Michelle Lee Muccio make those arguments? [...]
Back to our visitor.
Sitemeter identifies the latitude and longitude coordinates for visitor 100,000 as 30.2184, -91.0925. I have no idea how they arrive at those coordinates, but dropping it into Google Maps, we find ourselves near 5520 Monroe Lane in Carville:
One of the new features in Google Maps added since our last visitor benchmark, is Street View. By dragging the orange stick figure onto the map we get a ground level view of the location. The closest structure to this latitude and longitude is pictured at the top of the post. Yeah. I know.This is where any additional information to be gleaned about our visitor requires a leap of intuitive guesswork.
The Dividist assumes that visitor 100,000 does not live there. More likely, the lat/long designation from sitemeter is imprecise, and the visitor could be placed anywhere inside (or even outside) this picture. The Dividist thinks that industrial site to the right of the mark is a likely location.
It turns out this is a facility of Bear Industries, Inc. - a supplier of "aggregates for industrial, residential, and commercial use including limestone, gravel, sand, and river silt." So let's pull these threads together. Our visitor was surfing for pictures of Maria Bartiromo at 11:28 PM local time on an old computer using a corporate Windows OS and an obsolete browser. I'm thinking - a bored night watchman at the Bear Industries Carville facility who was working the graveyard shift on the night of December 7th, 2010.
Thank you for your visit sir. If you find this and contact me I will gladly send you a fine Dividist Button to commemorate your short but significant stay.
The Dividist thinks he will wait for visitor 250,000 before he does this again.
4 comments:
Thats probably not too far off actually. Being around for over four years is a feit.
You'd get a lot more traffic if you got yourself your own domain, a modern design, gave people more options to subscribe, got more active on twitter, recruited some contributors to get more posts up on here daily, etc etc etc.
Keep it up regardless.
Solomon Kleinsmith
Rise of the Center
Sol,
Sounds like some New Years Resolutions for the blog. Which will probably be broken by February. But I do need to pick up the pace on the social media front.
I also expect that changing sides from blue to red to blue every few years also tends to limit the partisan readership.
The lack of red-meat partisan ranting hobbles you. :-)
My blog is still relatively small, but growing crazy fast... I thought there was a giant untapped market for views like my blog (aggressive centrist). I think there is a huge untapped market, but there aren't any tried and true places for people to dig up those who aren't hard core partisans.
I also have some search ads on Yahoo, Bing and Google that bring in some traffic each day... not a whole lot though, and will be adding Facebook soon. This whole pulling traffic in thing is a heck of a learning curve, but pretty fun.
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