I have access to technology that enables me to monitor certain profiling information about visitors to my site[1]. Just basic information, mind you: I can't tell who the visitors are or what other windows they've got open on their computers or anything... yet.

For example, I can tell you that about 89% of my visitors this month use Windows (5% Linux), while 58% use Firefox (33% use Internet Explorer.) We must take into account, however, that I probably generate a fair amount of traffic myself (I find my own conversation inestimably amusing and delightful.) I can tell you that this month 105 unique visitors to my site have visited 284 times, viewing 1674 pages (many in the gallery, and most on a Monday), and that this was about half as many as December.

The craziness starts to come in when you look at your referrers... one can derive a whole lot of information from these. A referrer is the last page a person visited before coming to your site. Usually this is because that site linked to your own. This month, 33 visitors came through Scroop's site. More interestingly though, someone was referred to my site by the defective yeti logs, which requires a password to view. One could deduce that perhaps Matthew Baldwin, the author of the site, was perusing his own referrers and visiting them (I visit that site a lot). More likely he's got some stat-collecting bot or something.

The amusing tidbit that precipitated this entry, however, comes in the hits referred by search engines. The information gleaned in these referrers includes the terms for which the person was searching. I can tell you that people have been directed to my site by the following words and terms[2]:

• wife beater jeans
• leederville hotel stabbing
• indonesian single girls
• list of adjectives
• hunting games to play onion
• shaun cechner
• ray martin mcdonalds diet
• thai fuck girls
• swimming in honey
• linkdomain www.masaieditor.com</li>
• flatmate relationship mistake
• supersize me guy russo
• dr. paul cechner

I am not smart enough to understand the full implications of these terms and what my site is being used for. I have a friend who set up a page dedicated to sickos... perhaps you cannot escape them.

[1] Pretty much everyone who runs a domain has these tools. I'm not that much of an egomaniac...
[2] Note that I don't necessarily have content on my site reflecting these phrases... I perhaps have a few words mentioned (not necessarily together) somewhere. Please stop emailing me for the location of my 'thai fuck girls' page.