Under-reported blog traffic

— John Scalzi (mentioned below as “some idiot”) writes in to defend his opinion that blogger stats are inflated. He’s heard of firewalls, and wrote about them in the follow-up to the blogger-bashing article cited by Rebecca Blood. But he doesn’t seem to understand how widespread firewall use is, noting ” numerous small businesses don’t use firewalls.” Funny he should say that. The most popular router for small businesses is the Cisco 7200, a device that I used to write code for. The most requested feature on the 7200 was, guess what, a firewall. Nobody wants to surf the web without one, they’re even in common use in multi-computer homes, as Myria points out in her comments on my original post on this subject.

Scalzi also opines that AOL’s caching of popular pages doesn’t affect IP counts: “I doubt that ‘blog sites, typically modestly visited and with relatively few graphics, are cached frequently by AOL (I worked at AOL for
some time and have some understanding of their caching criteria, so I’m not
entirely pulling this out of my ass.” So let’s pull some data out of our referrer logs since our asses are busy inflating our numbers. In my top ten visitors list, I find three entries that look like this: “cache-rr06.proxy.aol.com.” This looks to me like a visit from AOL’s cache server. Am I wrong? So the bottom line is this: visitor counts are depressed by proxies, firewalls, NAT boxes, and AOL cache servers. They’re inflated by the alleged practice of AOL altering IP addresses in mid-session (do they really do that? It would play hell on routing if they did – AT&T Cable assigns you an IP address once and they never change it.) On the whole, these things clearly weigh in favor of depressed visitor counts, so page views is a better measure of traffic than anything else, and we don’t get page views from print because they can’t be calculated.

Scalzi also tells me that he’s a good buddy of war profiteer and generally disgusting sack of refuse Ted Rall. But in Scalzi’s defense, Bill Quick also says he’s a buddy of Scalzi, so the AOL man can’t be all bad. One degree of separation between Rall and Quick means we live in a strange world, but not one so strange we need it explained by the likes of Rebecca Blood, who remains firmly embedded in the clueless file.

Looking at Scalzi’s and Blood’s websites today, I find Scalzi saying “There is nothing more pathetic than a dad alone with his kid in the early afternoon.” and Blood calling women an “oppressed group.” I rest my case.