[WEB4LIB] E-mail discussion lists and blogs?

[Sean Volke]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Sloan, Bernie wrote:
> I guess what I am getting at is whether there is any hard information that could be used to measure the "audience" that you are reaching. You can get a general idea with e-mail discussion lists, e.g., a posting to Web4Lib theoretically reaches an "audience" of about 3200 people (i.e., the number of Web4Lib subscribers). How do you tell how big your blog "audience" is?

I was chatting about this last night with a couple of local
bloggers and my method is a bit rough but gives me a conservative
estimate (for my personal blog):

1. grep the ISP's daily web log for my account name and send
to a file.
2. sort by IP and remove duplicates
3. count remaining IP

This gives me a total of how many sites have accessed my site,
eg if 9 folk on bloglines are checking it, it will count as 1.
I can also tell how many of those are using the rss feed. As I
say, it's a bit rough, but it gives me a rough estimate of
what's happening with the site, and is more useful for chatting
changes over time rather than a daily "hit count".

One of these days I'd like to set up something a bit more
authoritative and can capture a bit more information (like
referrer logs) but this'll do for now.
-- 
snail @ smacktard net                                        http://snail.ws/
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel - Frost.