Dark Social

That sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

There were some interesting milestones that happened on Thanksgiving Day. My main blog got it’s 10000^th hit, and I was actually able to catch it right when the counter was exactly at 10000, so that was cool. Also, I sent my 1000^th tweet (my 666^th happened on Halloween), and I gained my 50^th follower.

That all of those nice even decimal numbers happened on the same day, and a holiday, is cool, and it is absolutely not something that I could have planned, because seriously, I have no idea how any of this happens. Like, with the Twitter followers, since then it has swung up to 54, and down to 47, despite having a new follower. I  have no idea why. That’s what makes this a good time to talk about dark social.

I read an article about this in The Atlantic on October 12^th:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/

If you are interested in this sort of thing, the article is worth reading, but to briefly sum up, not all web traffic can be tracked. Some visitors come from Facebook, any web page, maybe not even  social networking, and you can run data on that. If I bookmark the page and return or memorize the URL and type it in, that cannot be tracked. And for the social part, which probably accounts for a lot of web traffic, if you send e-mail with the link to friends, or share it in a chat window, then there is no referring URL, and the source is unknown. It is the web traffic equivalent of dark matter. We know it’s there, but that’s about all we know.

Shortly after starting the blog I added a hit counter. Some time later it broke, and I switched to using Google Analytics instead. Around July of 2010, Blogger itself started tracking hits on individual posts, and there is a Stats option where I can check referring sites and search terms, which is pretty similar to what Analytics gets me. I still check Analytics sometimes, mainly because if someone is using a longer search term, Analytics will show more characters.

The point is that I always want to know what hits I am getting and I would like to know whom and how and why. In reality, I don’t see the source of most of it. Much of what I do see is not logical. Some of the referral sites don’t really seem to link to me, and honestly, I’m not sure how a link would fit in on some of those pages, like the Korean Art Gallery, or the page with all the butt shots.

Sometimes I can see sense in it, like when I started getting hits on “A Guide to your Parent’s Knee Surgery”. I know how I felt when my mother’s knees were done, and how my thoughts were spinning when I was going through it; that’s why I wrote it. If some family was passing it around in e-mail, I get it, and I hope it helped.

Some make less sense. “Task: Exfoliate and Condition Hair” getting passed around makes no sense. There is no helpful information there, but suddenly it got over twenty hits last month, with no obvious reason why. “80’s fashion victim” is more reasonable, because if you lived through that time period, you relate, and you know people who relate.

People choosing to follow me on Twitter is even more mystifying, but sometimes there appear to be connections. In “Don’t Get Mad. Really” I mention the site Twitchy and Michelle Malkin, with whom it is affiliated. When I first posted it, I got a follower with Michelle Malkin as one of his interests. For a while, I had two super conservatives following me. (The other was something about choosing between Obama and America.) At one point they both dropped off, and I thought, well, I guess I can quit being paranoid.

Recently that post suddenly started getting hits again, without any obvious searches or referrals, and now I have another conservative follower. I assume they are monitoring me in hopes of ridiculing me at some point, or something like that. It could be from that Papa John’s thing. Whatever.

Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would follow me on Twitter. Mainly I just post my blog updates, which you could just as easily get by following the blogs, and then sometimes I reply to things other people are posting. Also, sometimes I can tell that the people I follow are bored, and then I will try and post more to ameliorate the situation, but I don’t feel like I am very helpful on that.

I am getting followed a lot by bands lately, which was surprising. At first I thought it was that my strong position on the importance of paying for music was giving me some popularity. In many cases, it is clearly aspiring bands trying to get more followers, which makes sense, but I am curious about how they choose people to follow.

Anyway, I do eventually listen to all of them, and I intend to review all of them via the blog as well, though depending on how fast the number grows, it may not be practical. Then there are ones where they maybe only have three songs available now, and I wonder how I can review that, and then I think, finally, a short post! That will be great.

Ultimately, I have to accept not knowing, and really, it’s not like having the page hit really means that someone read the whole post—they could come, decide the layout is ugly, and bounce, and I won’t know. (Unless there are comments. You have no idea how I long for comments!)

It is really only a curiosity issue. Even if I find that there are some topics that are more popular, I’m still going to write what I have in me to write. That’s not going to change. I like seeing a lot of hits, and I feel bad when there are posts that were really good but no one is reading. (Why does “There are some things money can’t buy” have 170 hits and “Geek = Joy” only has 13? How is that fair?) Going over this is a good reminder. Once I put it out there, it’s out there, and if no one needs it now, but will in the future, it will still be there. Embracing uncertainty seems to go along with embracing chaos. I can live without knowing.

However, if I have a sudden spike in bands following me, I am going to assume that’s connected to this post and the promise of me reviewing them. Currently there are seven in line ahead of you, not counting the seven related to the concerts I’ve been too. I can probably have everyone covered over the next two months.