Living the Fictional Dream

Stephen has equipped my blog with an analytical software. I can look at it and see how many visitors the site gets, where they’re from, and how they got here (e.g., came directly, clicked a link on another site, through a search engine, etc.).

The two most interesting things about these statistics are (1) the searches people run that bring them to my site (”Strange Horizons” and “Penderwicks” are two of the most recent) and (2) where visitors are located. Apparently sharing links and reviewing books are good ways to get yourself noticed on search engines.

The map feature is the one I really like, though. You can drill all the way down to the specific cities, and they seem fairly accurate. Though, there is no McGregor on the list — Waco and Woodway appear, but no McGregor. I’m sure those in McGregor have been folded into the Waco/Woodway tally. Perhaps McGregor is too small to have its own IP address tally or something? I don’t know how these things work.

Some locations, I know who the viewer must be. **waves hello to Deana in Arizona and Katie in Colorado** But others, I have no idea. The site has a significant number of hits from Minneapolis/St. Paul and Kansas, which was surprising. And there have been hits from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vancouver, and the U.K., among others.

While all these particular statistics are probably interesting only to me, they got me thinking about what a small world the Internet has made. Today you can have a good friend who lives in Australia or S. Korea and keep up a good relationship through blogs, chat, and email. It’s not like when I was a kid and it was hard to keep up a friendship to someone who moved to another city in the same state or another state entirely. I remember waiting six weeks for mail from my friend when she went on a trip to France.

The last time I was at home, my dad told me that he’d run into a couple of my high school teachers and given them my blog’s URL. **waves hello to Mrs. G. and Mrs. H.** That’s another way that the Internet can bring us in touch with people, in this case, people from our past.

Part of it is word of mouth. Part of it is the magic of the Internet — search engines, referral links, etc. But the Internet really does bring is into contact with each other in ways that we weren’t before. And it’s through writing. Sometimes images, of course, but mostly writing. I write stuff on my blog, other people write stuff on their blogs, and then we read it. It’s kind of like creating that “vivid fictional dream,” but we’re creating it through writing about ourselves, writing about life.