The small beauties of site meters

I love my site meter. Not because it tells me how many people visit my blog, but because it tells me why. And from where.

Tonight I got hits from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Sunnyvale, California, as well as Dublin, Winnipeg and Nova Scotia.

I get a lot of hits from Sunnyvale. Don’t know why. Don’t know anyone there.

I keep track of people who are out of contact – our man in Belgium who left with a back pack and through the site meter became our man in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and is now our man in New Zealand. Soon to be our man in New York and then our man in Halifax.

People in Nova Scotia. People in Ireland.

And some of the searches are so strange.

Today, someone Yahooed ‘crabulate’ and my blog was the only site that came up. So someone else on the planet likes the sound of that word and thinks it should be a real word.

Today, someone else searched for ‘prices liquor store Digby Nova Scotia’ and my blog came up. Before that of the liquor store.

Score.

I get some great comments too. Recently, Jeff Finlay commented on my use of Fergus Finlay in a simile (more vindicated than Albert Reynolds, more right than Fergus Finlay), whilst admitting that he hadn’t the faintest idea what my post was about. Or telling me why he was googling Fergus.

The woman who owns my favourite shoe shop in Ireland read my electronic paeon to her stock when she googled her shop's name, and used the comment box to ask whether she could quote me in her advertisements.

I said yes. I'm sure I'll get discount some day.

And then there are the regular commenters, and the regular readers who don’t know the regular commenters, but feel like they do after a year of reading their comments.

It’s all bringing us electronic elders closer together.