Visitor 100,000

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? [...]
  

Despite the occasional Rule 5 post, the Dividist is clearly not being a sufficiently conscientious student of Mr. McCain's insightful guidance. At the current pace this blog will finally pass the one million visitor threshold sometime in the year 2050. The Dividist will be 97 years old. Yeah. I know.

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.

Divided and Balanced.™
Now that is fair.

Visitor 50,000

Early this morning, at 1:18 AM California time, DWSUWF was graced by our 50,000th visitor. It took us two years to see this milestone, which places us in the second (or third or fourth) tier of political blogs. Some political blogs get this many visitors every week or month, but still - 50,000 is notable for us. It took nine months for our 10,000th visitor to find us, six more months to capture the attention of our 25,000th visitor, but only 10 more months more to double that milestone to 50,000. If we can double again in 10 months, we'll be looking for visitor 100,000 early in 2009.

So what do we know about visitor number 50K?
He/she lives in Glasgow, Scotland and was busy googling at 9:18 AM in the morning, wanting to know who sang the song "United We Stand, Divided We Fall", and found us from this query. From there, our visitor landed on the DWSUWF post "A Good Death", which contained all the words in his/her query. That post was a tribute to Cornish immigrant Rick Rescorla, who fought heroically as a US Marine in the battle Ia Drang in Vietnam, and died saving others in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001 - probably while singing the "Defiant Men of Harlech". I don't think that is what our visitor was looking for. More likely, he/she was looking for "The Brotherhood of Man":


What else do we know about our visitor?
He/She uses a PC with Microsoft Windows XP, Internet Explorer version 6.0, and a screen with 800 x 600 resolution. Based on their ISP, our visitor is likely either a student or faculty at Cardonald Community College, and according to Sitemeter's latitude longitude, lives near the intersection of Brereton and Boyd Street, and is about to be run over by a lorry on Boyd Street:

Our visitor has a fifteen minute driving commute along this route to get to the college, with that PC screen resolution, and that musical taste, and an obsolete browser, I'm guessing our visitor is in the faculty age group. Finally, since our visitor is only about a kilometer from Hampden Park...

... he/she is probably currently scheming how to get tickets for the upcoming Scottish Cup Final on May 24. Thanks for the visit, and ...

Go Doonhamers!

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags: United Kingdom, United We Stand, Glasgow, Visitor, blogging, Scotland, Brotherhood of Man.

Clinton cleavage captures attention of 25,000th visitor

SiteMeter informs us that we hosted our 25,000th visitor yesterday. Almost missed it - but we were able to track down the visitor before he/she disappeared over the 100 visitor horizon we are limited to with the free sitemeter:


Our 25,000th visitor found us by way of Jon Swift's fine post Hillary Clinton's Cleavage Emboldens Our Enemies. I posted a comment linking back to my not unrelated essay - Sizing, Dividing, & Balancing Government - An Illustrated Primer. This being one of the illustrations from that post:

So what do we know about our 25,00oth visitor? He/she has a Firefox browser on a Windows XP computer with a high resolution screen, subscribes to Comcast cable, is interested in politics, enjoys satire, is attracted to women's breasts, and according to the sitemeter latitude/longitude, is standing in this field next to a pond near Round Lake, Illinois.

Maybe he was fishing for catfish while browsing for breasts. I don't know what he was doing. I do know that 25,000 visitors in 16 months is a very small fish in a big blogospheric lake, but nevertheless noteworthy. We last took note of a milestone with our 10,000th visitor in January after nine months of operation. Seven months later we are up to 25,000. Maybe we can get to 50,000 by the end of the year. Maybe not. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: 07/27/2007
BREAKING: We have not yet received a letter from the Clinton campaign demanding an immediate retraction of this blog post. However, given the objections to the Washington Post fashion article expressed in Clinton campagin advisor Ann Lewis' fund raising letter, we expect to be hearing from them soon. It is probably just lost in the mail. We will inform the DWSUWF readers immediately upon receipt.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags: divided government, libertarian, Hillary Clinton, Round Lake, blogging, breasts, sexist.

Visitor 10,000 arrives with norovirus

Nine months into this little project, and we enjoyed our 10,000th visitor today. While we are not setting the blogosphere on fire, it is nevertheless a milestone worth noting. Mr. /Ms. 10,000 is apparently a disgruntled New Orleans Saints fan, who followed back a salt-in-the-wound comment I left on Craig Giesecke's post at the Metroblogging New Orleans site this morning, and arrived on our "Crown their ass" post for a short visit. I don't know why I leave comments like that. Blame it on Bush. Reggie Bush. Our visitor's ISP is shielded from sitemeter, so I don't know much more about him/her, except to recommend that he/she upgrade their browser (IE 6).

While I am off-topic, this is the view from my terrace -

You are looking at the QE2 which arrived in San Francisco this morning. The QE2 is in the midst of an around the world cruise. Almost 20% of the passengers have contracted a norovirus since embarking on her voyage from New York. As we speak, these rich pukes are spreading their norovirus contaminated tourist dollars all over our fair city. I think I will just stay indoors and watch c-span for a couple of days. Fortunately I still have duct tape and plastic sheeting as recommended by the Department of Homeland Security to protect against exactly this type of biological attack.

Plague Ship.

UPDATE: January 25, 2007
The City was saved when the plague ship slipped out of San Francisco Bay under the cover of darkness at 10:30 last night - seen here steaming in front of Alcatraz (sorry about the picture quality - best I cound do with my camera).


Hawaii, you are the next port of call for this doomed ship and its cargo of diseased passengers and crew. I recommend a high seas interdiction. If that fails, mine the harbor. Good luck.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags:Chicago Bears, San Francisco, Divided Government, QE2, norovirus, Hawaii, Bush, New Orleans.