Ode to the unknown reader

As I had said in an earlier post, I have not been here, in the blog sphere very long. So I don’t know anything about anything and am too lazy to educate myself. But, as a matter of routine I had created accounts on a couple of the free web stats services out there. And then promptly forgot about them. Yesterday, I was badly stuck on something and needed to kill some time to allow my subconscious to mull over my confusion (that is my excuse for browsing instead of working while in my office :)) So, I went to these websites to look at the stats for this blog. Now, my lack of knowledge on how these stats are acquired prevents me from really understanding what they mean (for example, if somebody reads me through their feed reader, as some of you do, how would this show up in the sitemeter stats?). But to the extent that I do understand them, it appears that I have more readers than I know of!

Everybody knows that we see things not as they are, but rather as we are. So, my model blog sphere inhabitant is based on me. And when I read someone’s post all the way through and like what I read, 9 out of 10 times, I leave a comment, even when I don’t have anything intelligent to contribute to the topic being discussed in the post. The exceptions to this being if the blog writer is one of the more famous ones like my reptile object of admiration Sunil or the master of logic with a really erudite audience (going by his comment threads) Falstaff just to name a couple, or there are already a number of comments to the post in question and I don’t wish to add to the already redundant thread. So, I assumed that this was true for everybody else as well.

But that is surely not the case according to my stats. For example, I appear to have a couple of regular readers from my alma mater, the school that is the defending NCAA football AND basketball champs this year. And I don’t think I know who they are! And another surprise I found was that people stumbled on some of the posts from google searches! It is a surprise in two ways, one, just the fact that a page shows up within the first few results of any search at all and the second, the reader actually spent five minutes on the page they landed!

I guess that just as in real life, not a day goes by without learning something new and hence finding one more piece of a puzzle that is just beginning to take shape. Anyways, just wish to say thank you for reading. One needs at least an illusion of an audience to force oneself to think clearly and if they have a real one, all the better!