Referrals

So I have Sitemeter on all of my blogs. It allows me to compulsively track who uses my blogs. And believe me, compulsively do I track. I like stats at the best of times, and in this particular case the human element is amazing to me. Where people come from, how they get to my blogs... on the off chance that anyone links to one of my blogs, it'll show up.

The off chance. It hasn't really happened so far... I've seen one or two referrals from sites that appear to use some kind of trawling system to automatically link blogs. They don't show much evidence of human content, are good for two or three hits and then fade away. Every now and then I see a referral from Hotmail or Gmail or something - meaning someone has e-mailed another person a link to my site. That's gratifying, but I can't follow up on it or see what it is. The only real referral I've had so far was just a few days ago, when my blog, "Better as a Single" started getting hits from Twitter. It was gratifying, because I was feeling that that blog was particularly unloved and was thinking of retiring it. It was only good for 20 or so hits, but that was a huge number for that undernourished blog. And so, since I keep a Twitter account that I rarely used, I logged on to see what it was. Turns out it was the Sleeveface guy, someone who's published a book, a book I've seen for sale and flipped through in Indigo or wherever it was. So someone who I can scan as a 'celebrity', however minor, gave me a shout-out. And once on Twitter I asked Yoko Ono a question and she answered it... Ah, I'm all a-flutter with the flush of celebrity hobnobbing...

Anyway, it turns out that this referral business is quite a boost. Makes you feel that people out there actually are reading you. And, of course, Sleeveface guy beats the other shout-out referral currently ticking away my Sitemeter numbers... the fact that I titled an entry of this current blog 'Jailbait' has it showing up in an autotrawling site called, glory be, www.jailbaitgallerypics.com. Ah, may parents would be proud...