Calibrating Blog Traffic Tracking

A classic information illusion arises on the net: the conflation of a click with a look with a read. It’s easy to track how many far away computers access a web page, not so easy to figure out whether anything on that web page was seen, read, thought about, etc.

So, a small experiment so I can come up with a tentative correction factor for the “visitor” count. If you actually read a post here could you post a very short comment to the effect of “yes, in Portland (or where ever)”? I’ll set it so it can be anonymous and not require signin and so on. I’ll leave this hear for a day or two to see if it garners any results.

Just click on “comments” below and a new window will open up.

Thanks,

Dan

Author: Dan Ryan

I'm currently an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com. I've been a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. I'm driven by the desire to figure out how to teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily.

One thought on “Calibrating Blog Traffic Tracking”

  1. Hi from Princeton, NJ. I’m not sure this experiment will show much, since I expect many readers would not take the time to comment without some further reason for doing so.But I have a request: can you please set your site feed to ‘full’? I use a feed reader, and it’s a significant hassle to have to click through every time I want to read a post.

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