Introduction
The general reality—what
it’s about—of Internet metrics is not hard to learn about.
It should be pretty obvious to frequent users of the
Internet that there is a wealth of gathered information available (from certain
online entities) on the performance of specific cases of the plethora of blogs,
Web sites, social media, etc. Apparently, according to one such column in a
recent issue of The Star-Ledger,
Google Analytics conducts a huge industry of gathering such info. While trying
to figure out how best to use my blogs—in terms of putting written material
“out there,” as well as try to interpret the inferable responses—I find the
occasional biz-section column in a newspaper useful when it discusses such
means of gathering “metrics,” measurements of what’s going on with my blog
entries. And it would be irresponsible to totally ignore this.
A more specific
phenomenon I have also encountered raises another interesting point or two.
In 2011, I became aware (from a Google search) of an apparently custom-made
site, displaying specific metrics (numbers, etc.), that showed apparent
analysis of my three-page, personal Web site that I maintained through August
2011. This metrics-showing site was an apparent product of something called
sitetrail.com (I have a few relevant printouts about this at home). The sitetrail.com
analysis of my own Web site seemed bogus in a way—a sort of red herring—for
reasons I won’t fully go into here (in fact, it is among a set of documents I
gathered in anticipation of a possible cyberstalking complaint, addressable to
a federal agency). But it included such analytical info as the terms (words or
phrases) that occurred most frequently in my Web site and the percentage of
times they occurred, etc. ([corrections made] One fact that suggested it was bogus is that it
clearly said [in a May 3, 2011 version] that only one page of my Web site was "indexed in major search engines like Google," while in fact two pages of my Web site could clearly
be found listed, in different places, from tailored Google searches, certainly by June ~21, 2011.)
Aside from this specific sitetrail.com example, a lot of this type of analysis—e.g., what words
appear how many times—which is eminently derivable from the protean/prodigious
analytical potential of the likes of Google, is not terribly interesting to me.
If I had to write mindful of what words
would be analyzed to appear with X frequency, I would go nuts. That’s not
how I write.
Long story short, one set of statistics on my blogs that I
have at my disposal is interesting, but it is subject to my own means of
pondering, intuitive interpretation: the listing of amounts of links made to
specific entries in my two blogs. It would seem these numbers represent the
number of times someone has e-mailed a given entry to someone else, as well as
such linkages as someone linking to an entry in his or her own blog, Web site,
etc. There are also separate stats [correction here] that reflect the "+1" feature of Blogger, where a reader can toggle a designator that shows he or she really likes the entry; such toggles apparently add up arithmetically. A couple of my entries show this.
Findings for this blog
Here, for your consideration, are a few sets of findings
from these stats. My reviewing the larger set of data from which these stats
come is a work in progress, and subject to changes in how I will interpret
them. (And I don’t comment here on my other blog, which raises different issues
in part because of its smaller size.)
For instance, I decided to list here the “top” entries in
terms of their having 40 or more links,
with 40 a very arbitrary number (from your perspective, not necessarily from
mine). I should note that almost all my entries have some number of links above
zero, and many have 8-10 or more. Some, dealing with a constellation of the
same sorts of topics, have about 25 or more. If I listed the “top __ entries”
with 25 or 20 links as a criterion, I think the list would more than double in length.
By the way, I do not take these stats to reflect,
necessarily, the quality of the more linked-to entries; some people e-mailing
the links to others could easily have had a bemused or mocking attitude toward
them. But it’s heartening to me that many of the most-linked-to entries are
among the ones that were most interesting to me to write.
Some inferences I can draw are easy. First, keep in mind
that the total number of page views of this blog is in the several-thousands.
My biggest “hit” by far, the November 6, 2012, item on Gene Mulvihill, has well
over 350 links, the highest number (more than any other) by over 200. As well,
numerous entries related to topics that I have covered as related to him in
some way (many appearing in November and December 2012) also have
higher-than-normal numbers of links. I can infer from this that a chunk of my readership, though by no means
the only way to define my readership, is a slew of people in the Vernon
Township, N.J., area. (This was not necessarily as I intended, by the way.)
Another set of readers, most likely (and the set that
coalesced first, or among the very first) is from the medical-promotions realm,
and from one company in particular (whose name I don’t think I need to
mention).
In statistics—an area of math I never took a class in, though
it was frequently alluded to in my psych studies; and an area I have always
looked at askance, though I have a rudimentary idea of some of its
concepts—there is something called “factor analysis,” where you take a batch of
empirically gathered data and do some calculation on it (with a criterion being
the measured level, following an a priori
standard, of whether something is NOT due to chance). You look at—indeed, do
specific calculations about—correlations between bits of data, and you discover
what patterns of correlations there are; and from how these sort out, you come
up with “factors” that are suggested by which data tend to cluster together in
terms of relating to one another and thereby suggest some specific meaning. (That
is, clusters of one set of things tend to cohere in relation to X apparent
meaning; clusters of others tend to associate, and altogether suggest Y
meaning.)
So, an informal
factor analysis of my links (I don’t know how to do an actual one), aiming at
what the audience subgroups seems to be, would suggest the following factors/subgroups
(and these aren’t necessarily in order of size):
* the “Vernon Township area readers”;
* the “CommonHealth/other-medical-promo-company readers”;
* a set of people in the sci-fi/fantasy-fan realm, who are
interested in Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss, the 2007-08 Bauer lawsuit, etc. This group, of course, accidentally gravitates
toward me for whatever relevance they think I have to them, in light of the
spectacularly coincidental way I got involved with them via the lawsuit (in
2008, and in 2006 via my comments on the Writer Beware blog).
Still other audience subsets would be more random sets of
people—including:
* some who knew me years ago in contexts other than those
relevant to the groups above; and
* others who never met me, who are in locations from where
they can readily access my blog (in the U.S. or elsewhere) and share by e-mail links some of
its items with associates of their own.
I wouldn’t hazard to estimate how big these different groups
are compared to each other. But one thing is pretty certain, I think: all these
groups are pretty “independent” in the sense that they don’t have a lot of
overlap with each other in terms of “members,” and even the sets of interests,
professional backgrounds, and so on, would probably not overlap much. (See End note 1.)
The top entries (figures gotten July 30, 2013, and of course
changing over time) are presented in reverse order by number of links:
1. Initial remarks on Gene Mulvihill (November 6, 2012): 359 links
Some added
perspective on Gene Mulvihill, the New Jersey
businessman (active in Sussex
County) who passed
recently
2. Review of Winter’s
Bone (May 15, 2012): 115 links
Movie break: Why deny
the parentified child (in meth territory)? Winter’s Bone (2010)[:] Under the
heading of “Beowulfian Protestantism”: A wildly tested backwoods young woman
keeps honest while her frayed community can’t quite
3. Second part of my review of The Insider (October 3, 2012): 100
links
Movie break: An
“adult picture” on an issue that concerns everyone—corporate malfeasance
affecting nationally distributed products and health: The Insider (1999), Part
2 of 2[:] A drug-delivering business acting like a Mafia
4. Third part of “What in the Name of Medicine?” (December
28, 2012): 95 links
What in the Name of
Medicine?, 3 of 6: Focus on the Silliest
Clown in this Mess, in view of violations of editorial standards, and religious
hypocrisy in the workplace [CC #4, 5]
5. Signpost 2 (May 22, 2012): 73 links (I don’t know why)
Signpost 2: Showing
what’s ahead for late May and early June [2012]
6. My review of Girl,
Interrupted (April 19, 2012): 72
links
Movie break: Winona
Ryder as “power waif”: Heathers (1989) and Girl, Interrupted (1999), Part 2 of
2
7. Part 2 of my review of Matchstick Men (August 3, 2012): 71 links
Movie break:
Matchstick Men (2003), Part 2 of 2: Family opportunity counterbalances the story’s
grim side
8. Second version of my review of The French Connection (May 24, 2012): 64 links
Movie break: Slobs
and anger, cops and drug-conspiracy: The French Connection (1971)
9. The second of my series on films on “females’ psychological
odysseys” (February 17, 2012): 63 links
Movie break: Films
about young females’ psychological odysseys, Part 2 of 3[:] More clinical
tales, or stories of immersion in personal instability or growth
10. My review of Blue
Crush (August 21, 2012): 51 links
(!)
Movie break: “Perfect
Pipe Now”: Blue Crush (2002)[:] Update on surfer movies is best for its water-level
view of the most dangerous type of surfing
11. Why no blog comments? (November 13, 2012): 48 links
Why don’t I allow blog
comments? A quick explanation; “Beowulf don’t text”
12. Signpost 1 (May 3, 2012): 46 links (!)
Signpost: Showing
what’s ahead for early May [2012]
13. Was my tone too nasty…? (November 23, 2012): 43 links
Skoder-tale
interlude: Was my tone too nasty for Thanksgiving time?
14. Writer Beware award (May 24, 2012): 40 links
Note on the blog Writer
Beware’s recent awards
What to make of
number 1?
The stat about Mulvihill deserves some comment. It continues
to astonish me that this number is so high, and the reason, in a way, is
obvious: the local news coverage of his death last fall was astonishingly
myopic, and (I would think) people sought something public available that
covered more of the reality. And, independent of this result, simply in terms
of planning, I would not have thought I’d write anything on his death that
would earn a lot of attention, much less had ever wanted to write anything on
him “elegiac,” “summary of his life, good and bad,” etc. The reason isn’t
personal, as if related to animus; the reason is that there were plenty of
other people in town who had much stronger feelings about him, and probably knew
much more factual about him, than I did.
The fact is that it was a simple reality in Vernon Township,
from the 1980s on, that he was firmly reviled among some, and/or suspected by a
range of people, with the result that, operating completely independently of
his interests, certain local “grouped interests”—whether a group of local
Democrats supporting a candidate, or a local newspaper—could be subject to
unapologetic suspicion about whether said political group was a shameless
puppet of Mulvihill, or whether said newspaper was secretly financially
supported by Mulvihill. Both ideas are wrong, and obviously wrong. (See End note 2.)
But views against him were such that people—and they didn’t
have to be stupid—floated these ideas as if they believed in them. One example
is that a former high school classmate of mine, who worked in the township
health department as an inspector (he had majored in a science, I believe, at
college, and after college and when working, he had to take courses while
working as an inspector to get certain certifications, or such; and he was, in
1979-80, among the members of the National Honor Society when we were in high
school), said in the early 1990s or thereabouts that he suspected—or he asked
me, but in a way as if his notion would be hard to dispel—that Mulvihill
financially backed the little township newspaper of the time, The Vernon News.
I forget what I answered, but it would have been fairly in
line with this: this hypothesis was not only highly—virtually 100 percent—unlikely
as a fact, but in terms of a business possibility,
it was nigh-impossible, because (1) The
Vernon News was in fact a money loser (it was closed down before long), and
even at the time, any local newspaper was tough to keep going financially—it
had no big profit margins; (2) anyone who has a significant financial stake in
a publishing entity is not going to keep that secret—if someone backs something
like a newspaper, he or she will want the public exposure of this; and (3) moreover,
there are legal documents/records, such as registration of incorporation or U.S.
Postal Service reports that are annually made (for mailed publications) in
about September, that must list who is the publication’s “publisher,” which is
essentially the company owner.
For this and other reasons, it was beyond silly to think
Mulvihill was a (part) owner of The
Vernon News; in fact, it would have almost been paranoid to think so. Granted,
my friend (by virtue of his career/background angle) wouldn’t have known all
these ins and outs of the local-publishing world. But it goes to show how
people in this town could let their biases in line with anti-big-biz-boogeyman
feelings trump their open-mindedness and curiosity to know just how even the
publishing industry works. (I think this friend’s idea was somehow supported by
his feeling that the paper was unjustifiably sympathetic to Mulvihill in some
reporting on one or more local-development issues, which idea also, in my
opinion, would not have been fair to the facts.)
When the obituaries about Mulvihill came out last fall in
local newspapers including The New Jersey
Herald, they were astonishing to me. Such banal encomiums were made such as
that Mulvihill kept on “dreaming” (as motivating his development projects; this
remark quoted someone in particular), and that this was only to the
incontrovertible betterment of Sussex County. And reading this (to me) could
make a person of minimal sanity felt like he or she had died and gone to a hell
comprising an alternate version of New Jersey where everyone had lost whatever brains
they’d had before. For me, to write a blog entry on Mulvihill required very
little motivation of a strong kind. I did not write out of lingering anger at or
hate for him. Actually, I was more motivated to counter the local traditional-media
trend at the time in writing his obits, which was as harebrained and as
divorced-from-reality as some 1930s totalitarian propaganda.
Also, I tied my initial November 6 entry to the person I
pseudonym “Skoder” because, independent of any ideas about Mulvihill, I’d
longer had an idea to write on her, in relation to certain themes that the Bauer lawsuit, for me, inevitably
brought up. In any event, as provocative and “beans-spilling” as may be the
entries I wrote (related to Skoder) as sequelae to the November 6 entry, the
fact that my original Mulvihill entry is so much my most popular one is still surprising
to me, but it also raises a rather sad fact. It would seem that people share it
(via links, e-mailing and such), largely because they wanted some coverage of
him that related the negatives that applied to him in many people’s views
(whether opinions, knowledge of facts, etc.), and because none of the local
traditional media dared write more balancedly about Mulvihill in fall 2012. As
one example, no one pointed out—as a pure incidental to what Mulvihill in his
own right was opting to do as a businessman—what a political liability it was
(for people quite outside his orbit) to be associated in people’s minds
(inaccurately) with Mulvihill in local political campaigning here (as I
illustrate in End note 2).
No one in the media last fall alluded to the widespread folk
disenchantment with him that was in place over decades. And this journalistic oversight is, to me, sad, if not
dismaying. It also shows the place that blogs have in current American
discourse. I never said I was a traditional journalist. I am not the earthy
type that so many bred-in-the-bone newspaper types are. But when my blog, not
even intending to give a lot of focus to a local businessman of unquestionable
notoriety, nevertheless does so, and an entry with that focus then becomes an apparent
important supplement to newspaper reporting, that shows that a blog ferret like me is in a unique position to
provide some social service, even while the newspaper industry is under
extraordinary transition. This is something that, when it comes up in an ad hoc
fashion, I take seriously; but I don’t seek to do in as a broad, ongoing “venture.”
Theorizing about Mulvihill has even run to, in 2011, someone
opining in a Vernon Township–related chat room that Victor Marotta, the current
mayor, was remiss in not doing more for Mulvihill in the 1980s, regarding a
legal mess in which Mulvihill was held to account by the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (see my December 10, 2012, blog entry) when Marotta was
mayor of Vernon Township at the time (I have a link to this 2011 chat room
remark in my records [I don't share it here, because the poster's name is shown, and I don't want to embarrass him]). Facts: Not only
was Marotta, by virtue of what the case was, incapable of doing anything
legally for Mulvihill at the time—because the issues were federal and with the
state of New Jersey—but as the mayor, Marotta generally had no authority over
what was going on in this case. To bring up such a point in 2011 when Marotta
was back in office after many years is not just unfair, but reflects a striking
ignorance of basic relevant facts. But again, it shows the weird power of
discussing Mulvihill in this town.
Hopefully this is the last I have to say on Mr. Mulvihill.
Comments about my other most popular entries will wait.
End note 1.
I leave it up to you to infer what this says about what
people I’ve gotten involved with, for better or worse for my career, but it
does maybe provide some resolution for those people, on whom I gathered this
fact concretely and not always clearly over many years, who didn’t have a full
idea of what my background was, but tended to look at me as just a certain
profile (or “special flavor”) of person who met the needs of the specific
context we were in. This is probably a pretty true assessment of many of us (in
the U.S.) today—we all are “that sharp-dressed gal in H.R. during the day, and
[as associates at work don't know] the harried, slobbish mommy with an OxyContin issue at night,” or “the
smooth-talking guy in sales at day, and [as associates at work don't know] the shadowy, boozy card sharp at
night”; and so on. But for me, it had become especially impressive, in the parts
of the media world in which I’ve worked, how people can “know” you for only a
certain minor profile of yourself, and then they can get downright astonished
at what your other “sides” are—even while you have generally not carried on as
if you wanted to hide these other
sides (in fact, often, I left it up to other people to ask questions of me, and
usually, they didn’t have the curiosity or consideration to ask).
End note 2.
On the political-group issue: recently I found a clipping of
a New Jersey Herald article from 1990
covering the township-committee race that included Bill McGarvey, who was running
for the Republicans, and Richard Conklin, running as a Democrat. As I said in
my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog (in a November entry) and, I believe, in one or
more of my November 2012 entries on this
blog, the reality of local politics in Vernon Township through the 1980s and
’90s, and continuing in some way even today (while the government has more
recently changed to a nonpartisan form), is that Republicans are almost always
the party of choice for voters (this is basically true throughout Sussex
County, N.J.), and Democrats have almost never won; and when they’ve run,
though some in an independent position (like a newspaper) may utter reasonable
ideas about needing two parties for a healthy political system, the local Dems
have been looked at as quixotic at best. In Vernon, up through at least the
late 1990s, the Democrats were often looked at as a puppet group of, or some kind
of front for, Mulvihill and his interests. This was so ingrained that McGarvey,
in the 1990 article I mentioned, is quoted as saying that Conklin essentially
only represented Mulvihill; and this remark was presented—said that directly,
simply, and stupidly—not as if it was
to be taken as a mere propagandistic broadside or innuendo (that could be
easily recognized as such), but pretty much as if it was a solid tool worthy
for any voter leaning Republican to use to assess the other candidate. I have
known Mr. Conklin since the early 1980s; he has been a family friend,
especially of my mother’s. It was, and is, absurd to say he was, then or at
some other time, a puppet of Mulvihill. But a range of people (in a camp
opposed to him) could say it, and it apparently was as much believed by some as
it sounded stupid and a mere crass insinuation.
