Of course the real challenge becomes validating those whom the LPers label as “right wing.”

I must say it’s good to see you back in action.

I didn’t say there were no socially conservative blogs, as I would place both Bolt and Blair in that category. And obviously there are religious blogs. Just not ones that are coupled with an economically left-of-centre leaning.

That’s amusing there really aren’t many socially convervative blogs.

There is actaully one that I know . Don’t agree with the stuff he says, but he’s not a bad read (not foaming at the mouth type) and seems to over things from a socially conservative side.

Oz conservative

I sometimes take a look and see what’s he’s writing.

http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/

But can we get a link to those pic Cl is referring to. Honestly my curiosity is just killing man. Sorry, but I couldn’t help myself asking.

Sad, CL…….very, very sad.

# Mark is running for parliament? Or is he on the board of a company that’s just been rumbled for doing something immoral?

“nor for your effectively dragging me into a discussion which I didnt want to participate in. But since you raise it,…”

# Twist his arm, Laura – go on.

Some time ago, I compared hits between sitemeter and typepad stats for my blog. Significant difference so I just ignore. Also with RSS feeds these days, and people switching RSS readers without cleaning up the old stuff, difficult to work out your regular readers.

I get a fair share of random hits from people looking for images (and they come in clusters, for things like Guggenheim Bilbao, which makes me think school projects).

But my random google/search engine hits are consistently high for ‘dog fight’ (heh heh), ’sigheh’ (interesting that) and any one of the list of televangelist shysters in my Google god trilogy (thank you Sen. Bartlett; you may have done more than a few people a community service).

Oh and Lucas Neill’s girlfriend.

I dont know. Ive started using lots of images here at troppo over the last year or so, simply because I like doing it and think it adds an interesting extra dimension to the reader experience (especially some of the videos embedded in Missing Link posts). Whether this boosts the hit count I have no idea. Jacques may have some observations, because he monitors those sorts of things. I never look at our page read stats, referrer logs or anything else.

We get a steady flow of traffic from people looking for “female masturbation”, as it was mentioned in a Missing Link early last year. There’s also a steady flow of people who link an image we have of George W Bush in front of the infamous “Missing Accomplished” sign which I attached to one of my many posts about server stuff.

A few weeks ago we got a massive surge when a picture of Katherine Heigl we have started popping up on MSN images if you searched for “Elisha Gray”. Naturally enough most people, given a choice between looking at long dead telephone engineers and a nubile young pretty, choose the pretty.

On the old server we had a lot of problems with search engine crawlers; Yahoo’s slurp in particular is very poorly behaved. So for a while we blocked all search engines. These days the XML-Sitemap plugin keeps things sane, though Yahoo still turn over the whole archive every few weeks.

When I’m not cocking up, the new server has made life very easy. It’s powerful enough to serve about 100 sites of our magnitude, I reckon.

Do people seriously write in the fervent hope theyll be read?

Er yes, Niall. Yes they do.

Perhaps I didn’t make that as clear as I could in a private email which wasn’t intended to be discussed publicly.

The problem LP had at one stage was that a lot of bandwidth – which is a different thing from hits – was being taken up by images – which are big files and place extra stress on the server. My recollection (and I’m not 100% clear about this, and I don’t have time to check because I have to give a lecture in half an hour) is that we installed a script which would prevent access from google image searches and crawlers to free up more server resources.

As to the general discussion, I suspect a lot of what is going on is a sort of “practitioner” suspicion of academic research into their “patch”. To the degree that’s the case, I think people might reflect on that. In my view, Jason has shown exemplary courtesy – and also academic accountability – in responding to criticisms and questions. I look forward to the results of the research project.

Now I’m out of here.

Mark – you yourself emailed to the LP collective (7/12/07) that 16.4% of hits were coming from Google Images. I don’t care either way but you’re implying I’m making it up.

But I will take your apparent conversion in good faith.

Anyway, part of my shift in terms of thinking stats stoushes are meaningful relates to the “my hits are bigger than your hits” alpha male schtick which seems to cluster around any such discussion. To the degree that I’ve participated in that in the past, I am truly regretful!

Anyway, will leave youse to it.