Blogspot, the host of my blog and countless others, is quite sophisticated. If a person has a well-read blog, they can choose to monetize it. There are several choices that range from a penny a click on advertisements, to contracts with big name advertisers based on site traffic. One of the tools available to the users of Blogspot is a statistics counter that identifies the number of visitors, the country where each visitor is located, all referring sites, search engines used to find my blog, and the number of times each blog entry is visited.
The individual post on my blog that receives the most hits is the one mentioning the world's largest ball of string in Cawker City, Kansas and that makes me laugh. The blogs with titles mentioning Bob Dylan and Tenzing Norgay are next in frequency, for obvious reasons. For awhile, the photos I posted for The Handsome Earth received the most visits. I suppose someone, somewhere has stolen my photos of the Flint Hills, but I do not mind. Anything posted on the internet is no longer private or exclusive. If I do not want to share something, I should not post it to the internet.
For any of my loyal readers, rest assured that I do not know who you are, even if you choose to "follow" me under your real name. The statistics do not tell me who each visitor is. I suspect that a statistic indicating someone clicked into my blog does not mean that they were actually reading it. It is exciting to see that people from all over the world are visiting - China, Australia, Iraq, Russia. They are not marveling over my pithy wisdom, admiring my skillful writing talents - just clicking through. I do not have enough readers to monetize my blog and never will, so do not worry that you will begin to get spam from reading my posts.
But, it is fun to read the statistics and realize that just about anyone in the world is a mere mouse click away. We are truly a global community.
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