Background noise

LiveJournal has the advantage of the friends system. As someone who’s midly obsessed with web stats, finding out how many people read my journal is an endless hobby. Unfortunately, it looks like web pages, simply by virtue of existing, get about 30 or 40 “visits” per day. Or maybe more. Or maybe less.

Probably more. My stats register somewhere between 60 and 90 “unique visitors” on a daily basis…but it doesn’t go much outside of that, even on days where I don’t write anything. On LJ, I know that at least 53 people skip over my entries on their friends page. Here…who knows how many people are studiously ignoring what I write?

It’s frustrating because I want to cut out all the clutter — I want to eliminate the google, yahoo, MSN, and other search crawls. I want to eliminate the visits form spam crawlers looking for e-mail addresses or posting bogus comments (of which I get more than readers, I’m sure).

But it’s basically impossible, because as far as I can tell the internet has its own sort of “cosmic background radiation” that generates all kinds of weird traffic in werid ways. The only solid data I have is feed data, and nobody really uses RSS feeds. At best people, use them as alerts for when to visit the site.

So in the end, I have to just guess. Isn’t that all there is to statistics, anyway?