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Nightly Ramble: Sitemeter, Camping; Gas Still Falling; More

First day back from the camping trip. And yes, I’ll get to those pics; I promise. But there’s lots going on.

  • Offshore drilling is coming up for a vote [1]. Democrats are finally being forced by political reality, and by a deadline on old legislation expiring, to vote on drilling as close to 50 miles from shore, in both tha Talantic and Pacific basin. The sooner the oil drilling ban dies the quick and nasty death it deserves, the better off this country will be. But watch, now. Remember how Clinton used to get out in front of the lynch mob and pretend it was a parade he was leading? I’m telling you, kids, Pelosi and Ried will try the same nonsense… and the press will let them get away with claiming our progress in energy is because of Democrat leadership… in spite of the fact that our being stonewalled on energy for the last 50 years can be traced directly to the same Democrats.
  • Woe is Sitemeter. They tried putting up a new system over the weekend, and [2] the [3] response [4] was [5] almost [6] universally [7]negative. [2]Wanna know, though, what I really find problematic with Sitemeter? Accuracy. Let me show you something you may not know about. I do monitor BitsBlog from several different angles, using a few different tools. My internal monitor that I run at the florack.us server, shows the following numbers for the last year:

Summary by Month

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Month

Daily Avg

Hits

Files

Pages

Visits

 

 

 

 

Sep 2008

24517

21731

10711

1615

Aug 2008

19217

16960

12026

1589

Jul 2008

17428

15104

11596

1875

Jun 2008

17618

15457

11017

1853

May 2008

17179

14584

10706

2791

Apr 2008

16193

13525

9866

2711

Mar 2008

14921

12216

9001

2680

Feb 2008

16584

13695

9336

2526

Jan 2008

15482

12628

8889

2208

Dec 2007

13569

11224

8774

2159

Nov 2007

14670

11980

8942

2247

Oct 2007

16958

14460

7634

2027

    OK, first let’s be fair and define this stuff a bit. Hits on this chart are when the server response to a request. Because of the way the system is designed, it’ll get several requests per page resolution. What we’re about is ‘visits’, here. These are unique visits, which are regarded by Sitemeter as Note, please , that for the last year or so BitsBlog’s daily unique visit rate has been at a minimum, ~1600 visits per day, often reaching over 2500 HPD on average for the month. Now, let’s drill in just a bit, to the month of September which is only half done:

    Total Hits 343247
    Total Files 304244
    Total Pages 149962
    Total Visits 22621

    Again, pay the closest attention to the total visits.Working the numbers we’ve seen an average of 1508 unique visits per day. Remember, ‘visits are what Sitemeter supposedly counts as ‘hits’. Checking Sitemeter, I only see 6175 visits for the last 15 days. That’s an average of 411HPD. That’s a difference in hits of 16,446 for the month to date, and 1097 HPD… and we may assume if the trends hold, that the difference will be on the other of 30,000 hits by the time October rolls around. Am I the only one uncomfortable with this? Drilling deeper, I find average visits for each month for the last year also shows similar varience.. Do you suppose there’s an accuracy issue with one of them? Now, look; I know full well that Sitemeter is not counting RSS feed requests… and my own monitoring sytstem is… which I like…and is not counting bots such as Google, and AV and so on, which I’d not want it doing. I wouldn’t want it counting bots anyway, I suppose… but I cannot imagine that wild variance is all taken up with “botted” requests. Anyway, at least the RSS feeds should be included to get accurate readership figures. Hell, if I’m getting that big a discrepancy, I can’t imagine what places like OTB, Q&O, and yes, Glenn Reynolds are missing out on. We’re talking real money, here, in the end. I’m forced to ask as a matter of logic, why we in blogdom are using Sitemeter as the gold standard for Blog importance in places like TTLB, for example, (which is becoming alas, outdated itself.) Now, per the unsuccessful attempt yesterday to make itself more relevant, I applaud the attempt, if not the result. But may I suggest that we in the blogging world look closely at the numbers we’re getting for accuracy before we rate blog followings based on the output of Sitemeter?

  • Let’s see. On the one hand we have the leftist site “Think Progress” (Which in reality is neither) poking some fun at Karl Rove because he doesn’t trust supposedly neutral ‘fact checking’ orgs [8])On the other, we have Leftie Apologist Steve Benen [9] pointing at Rove saying that McCain’s ads went too far. Guys do us all a favor, would you? Figure out between you if you’re going to assume credibility on the part of Rove, or not, will you? . [8] (Rove has it right, BTW… I have problems with them too. Remember when news orgs were considered ‘fact checkers’? That era, apparently is long gone. What makes anyone think that the current fact checkers can’t be biased like the news people are?
  • I’m watching this business out in California with the rail accident. I’ll caution you to not jump to conclusions about the cause… including that the Engineer sent a Text Message before the crash’… [10]. There’s something more going on here, I suspect… something systemic. That point aside, this does say something for heavy trucks and increasingly smaller, lighter, flimsier cars occupying the same space on the highway. I’m by no means suggesting we eliminate trucks. But the reason for the high death and injury rate here is the weight differential.
  • Galveston, and for that matter, all of eastern Texas is basically out of action for a while. Interesting, how we’ve heard nothing from Louisiana, and particularly New Orleans, whose refugees were welcomed in Texas with open arms. Now Texas is in need [11] and where is NOLA?
  • Gasoline continues to fall in price [12], even in the face of the outcome of the storm. I’ve been out of pocket for a couple days, but the operational disruptions down there appear to be very short lived, and we’ll see prices falling again shortly. I paid $3.64 over the weekend, and saw it cheaper still. Oil’s at $96 and change per BBL [13] as of this monring,(I’m seeing some reports of $93) and looks to continue dropping, as I told you it would, last June. Anyone now willing t bet against me when I say it’ll be in the middle 70’s by years end?
  • Caught a fairly decent storm here outside Rochester last night.. the remenants of Ike. 60MPH gusts, they say. A number of radio stations went dark last night, inclduing one up on Bristol Mountain.
  • Send some hgood thoughts to Pat Hayden. [14]
  • Had an interesting accident here last week. I didn’t see much about it in the papers, but it’s worth the telling. Had a truck full of junk cars miss a turn on I-490 the local freeway, and dump his entire load, of about 20 cars. Imagine with me the look on the face of the first cop that shows up, seeing fattened cars all over the freeway and a truck in the middle of them, downside up. Messed up traffic in the city all morning, that did… and the cop, I’ve no doubt, had to get his pants cleaned.
  • Billy.. [15]. I shoulda figured you’d have already seen the bit with Mortin Sobell [16],  I was going to mention it in Friday’s Ramble  but you’d beat me to it before it went up. His story was eaten up by the left because it matched the mantra of the US as the big old meanie… the image the USSR had been pushing for decades by that point. And we needn’t bother discussing why the New York Times, the paper of Walter Duranty ate it up, huh?
  • Seems ACORN is behind fraudulent voter applications [17]. Gee, who’d have figured on that? Now, can we start asking more serious questions about Obama’s relationship with them? For example,w hy ACORN is featured on his website?
  • Huff and Puff is still making noises about Hillary Clinton being the VP choice. [18].. replacing Joe Biden, even at this late stage. .In all candor, I don’t think it’ll happen, but at the same time I have to wonder if the comments from Biden about how Hillary Clinton might have been a better choice, weren’t signaling something of the sort in the works behind the curtain?
  • And what’s this about Obama trying to get the Iraqi government to stall on troop withdrawals [19]?  Here’s yet another example of simply creating a law doesn’t really deal with a situation… in this case the Logan act.
  • Will someone pleae explain to me why anyone gives a damn what this walking trainwreck, Lindsey Lohan [20], has to say about Sarah Palin?