Blogger Stats

After about a year and a half of blogging, I admit that I had hardly ever looked at the Google Stats in the blogger program. I was amazed. First surprise: One of my posts last year around Thanksgiving, regarding Native American Spirituality, is the most viewed, by far, of the more than 100 posts I have done. And that post is not even about scootering, the primary theme of my blog. Second surprise: Where the viewers are coming from. The USA and Canada does not surprise me. The United Kingdom is a distant third, but many of the other countries surprised me. Oh, it's just a few from other countries, but was interesting. Russia? ..... Really? South Korea? VietNam? A few european countries were represented. Spain, The Netherlands, Germany. I found the statistics on page hits to be very interesting. I guess that I always assumed that the number of comments received was a good indicator of how much my blog was read. And I guess I always knew that some people read it, but didn't leave comments. I faithfully read a lot of blogs, but do not always leave comments. But now I realize, even more so, that number of comments is not really very indicative of readership. I love comments on my blog. Sometimes they are just as much fun as the post itself. And I like to pester people by commenting on their blogs. But sometimes it just becomes a matter of available time, not enough of it. Then another question is raised. How many if those page hits are my own? I frequently look at my own blog to check for comments. Some days I will do this many times, other days not at all. I guess I could click on my blog more often and artificially increase my own hits, but what's the point of that. Back to that Native American Spirituality post, though. I suspect that a reference or link in Google Images might have something to do with the number of hits to my blog. I had 'borrowed' a few images from there to use in the post. I am guessing that somewhere in Google Images that there may be a link to my blog. I really have no idea how this might work, and don't really care, but to me it is the only possible reason why that post has had so many hits. It certainly can't be from motorcycle or scooter enthusiasts. The number of hits is more than 4 times the number on the next highest post. Go figure. What this all means? I haven't a clue! I had a very excellent Statistics professor in college that said on the first day of class, "You can make statistics say anything you want them to if you just play around with the numbers long enough." I have never forgotten what he said and I think about that statement a lot, particularly when looking at television or other advertisements. Sometimes numbers can be very misleading. So maybe the Blogger Stats aren't that important. There may be certain interesting results, but in the long run I don't think it will change whatever modus operandi I have for the blog. I just enjoy blogging.