Monday, December 5, 2005

Counting is an amenity still unavailable to the Internet, even in our gilded age of technology, and you can take this to the bank. I’m not kidding. Slam it on the counter at your local branch and the teller will say, “This is precisely what I want. Thank you much.” And then you realize that, no, ATM’s do not speak to you.

I remember declaring back in the early days our independence from site statistics, a liberating move that’s come full circle. The detours were colorful and, as they say in the biz, feature-rich–graphs and charts conjured to decipher raw numbers and sunder the very anonymity we prize. The tools were free and accessible, until I realized nobody’s numbers agree on the Internet. A large part of the confusion stems from the unregulated terminology, where one man’s “unique visitor” is another man’s “pageview” is another man’s “ass” and yet another man’s “elbow.”

Until we reach the momentous day when the online equivalent of the metric system emerges, conservatively our readership is 7 to 150 people daily or, according to my personal analytics, fuck if I know. The Web is essentially the kid who, faced with the task of learning how to count on one preschool morning, proceeds to eat the peanuts the teacher had planned on using as visual aids. True story. My story.