Now in the Technorati top 15,000

Just found out that my wee blog ranks 14,647th in the Technorati cosmos, which is not bad going considering that it indexes 1.6 million blogs. Technorati ranks not on traffic, but on inbound links, which is I suppose both a measure of popularity and interestingness, as people have to first know about you in order to link to you, and you have to be writing something worth linking to in order to get a link.

I find myself to be rather pathetically chuffed at being in the top percentile of bloggers. I know I shouldn't care, but I do, really. Ok, so I'm not Gary Turner, up at 90th, but gimme some time and I will be.

Measuring the vital statistics of my blog is rather tricky though. We all know I suffer from chronic hitnosis, but the last couple of months the stats provided by Blog-City have been unfortunately skewed by spammers. December's figure was something like 36,000 hits, which was patent bollocks. This month's hit count is up to 21,428, but Nedstats insists the figure should be more like 4,000. Ok, so Nedstats can't count my RSS feed hits (5,140 for Jan so far), but even when you add that in, it's still only around 9,100 hits. That's still half the 'official' figure.

Thing is, even if I can rationalise the hits numbers, that still doesn't tell me all that much. Hits do not equal visitors. Blog-City have said they'll implement full downloadable logs at some juncture, so hopefully that will happen soon. Then I can do my own analysis and draw probably completely different conclusions.

More interesting than all that, though, is why am I so fascinated in this? I always have been – for almost every site I've ever run I have obsessively combed through the stats whenever I've had the chance. I shall start doing that again for Clwb Malu Cachu and Get Fluent soon, now I've got them both on a decent hosting service with reliable stats info. But at least I have a business reason for doing those two.

For this blog, though… is it really just down to ego? I'd really like to think not. I think it's more a fascination with you, the reader. Where do you come from? When do you visit? How often? Sadly, the one thing my logs won't ever be able to answer is Why?