Thoughts On The Global … An Editorial Comment.

The aim of a blog is to reach an audience. For many blogs this audience is anonymous; a number notched on a counter, a referral link that, on occasion, might provide some indication of the inclination of the visitor. More oft than many would link to admit these statistics are nothing more than spectres who haunt the complex web of blogs: next-bloged, they browse, and then pass on.

From its early stages, Dialectic has employed Site Meter to keep track of these passers-by. This is a thankless task, undertaken by a piece of software somewhere, that more often perplexes us who keep tabs on traffic flows than it sates our appetite to understand those who dally and peruse the pages. This state of confusion has been compounded recently.

Site Meter has added a World Map of Visitors to its tool set; Dialectic’s is here. This map allows the viewer to determine the location of a visitor to the page. This raises the question – slightly more perplexing – of how, of the ten most recent visitors (when checked), visitors from Qatar and Serbia and Montenegro could have made their way to the page; and the further question of what these visitors could have made of Dialectic. (The map also raised the question of why there were more recent visitors from Germany than almost anywhere else, but that does not warrant really thinking about).

In many ways, it is simply a sign of the global transmission of information that most go on constantly, almost without anyone really comprehending it.