Welp, that's my fifteen minutes...

   The above graph shows visitors to my journal during the period June 11 to July 7, 2005. June 24th was the Friday I was featured on the main journals page as the weekly Guest Editor. July 1st is the following Friday, on which day my spot in the limelight was usurped by Felicia.
   So tell me, are readers just fickle, or is my blog boring? Perhaps this random bolding will liven things up a bit. What do you think, more interesting? No, I didn't think so.
   All in all, it was an interesting week. I received hundreds of comments and e-mails, many of which I am still trying to catch up on replying to. As you can see from the graph, I averaged well over 250 unique visitors per day for the week; more than a fivefold increase in my daily traffic. Early returns indicate my regular traffic may be up from an average of 40 hits per day before my Guest Editorship, to about 50 hits per day now. I hope I can live up to the pressure of being unboring to 25% more people than I'm used to.
   It was interesting to look at the stats for those visitors over the course of the week. In addition to cities from all across the US and Canada I received hits from:

Caloundra, Melbourne, Sydney and other Australian cities.
Milano, Bologna, Roma, and other Italian cities.
London, Sheffield, Wolverhampton, and other English cities.
Dublin, Ireland.
Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia.
Yigo, Guam.
Mazowieckie, Poland.
Essen, Germany.
Doha, Qatar.
unknown locations in France.
Several Caribbean Islands.

Also notable were some of the domains from which I received visits:

the FAA
NASA
WGRZ TV, Buffalo
County of Riverside, California
Universita' Di Pisa, Italy
Memorial University of Newfoundland
University of Arkansas
University of Iowa
Milwaukee County Gov't
Bank of Nova Scotia, Toronto
9th communications squadron, Beale Afb, California
Oakland unified school district, Oakland, California
State center community college district, Fresno, California
US department of defense, Washington, D.C.

   I suspect the numerous hits from University ISPs were partially due to one of my posts being featured on the skeptics' circle that weekend. This week's skeptics' circle went up yesterday, by the way. Head on over and check it out for a collection of skeptical blogging from the last two weeks.
   OK, so you're saying, "how in blazes do you know all of that stuff about where your site visitors are from, Paul?" Well, I'll tell ya. <~~(Pretend you can hear my John Wayne impersonation as you read that.) I have an external counter attached to my site from StatCounter. Take a look over there in my left sidebar. At the bottom of my about me section you will see a six digit number. That is my stat counter.
   "But, Paul," you ask further, "why is that number different than the number on your AOL counter?" The answer to that is that the AOL counter counts every single page load on your journal, including your own visits. If you are the kind of blogger that edits your articles mercilessly, like I do, you may notice that your counter goes up five or six digits just from editing and saving the page several times.
   I have my StatCounter counter set to record only unique visitors. What that means, is that once a person visits my journal once, the counter will not register them again unless they go away for more than six hours. In addition, it does not register my own visits to my blog, so that number more closely approximates the real traffic here.
   But wait! Popular wisdom around the J-Land community has it that external counters take up so much space that they use up your whole about me section. How is it that I have a bunch of other stuff in there? Simple. Most of the external counters use javascript code. AOL's journal interface does not support the addition of external javascripts, so what you end up with is a mish mash of code that appears too large for the about me section's 1000 character limit. StatCounter offers an html only versionof a counter that easily fits.Sure, it doesn't track some of the more esoteric stats, like referral pages, or search engine string referrals, but it does do the things I have described above. Fun, huh?

   One last thing before I head off to bed, where I really should be already. In my Guest Editor article, I mentioned the concept of blog carnivals, like the Skeptics' Circle. I'm thinking of starting an AOL Journals blog carnival. Not a themed one, like the Skeptics' Circle, or the Tangled Bank, but a general Carnival of the Vanities. The concept is simple. Got a blog entry that you are particularly proud of, but hasn't been widely noticed by the community? The Carnival of the Vanities would be a showcase to get it out to a wider audience. Once every two weeks or so, I would put out a call for submissions, and you would send me a link to the entry you'd like showcased. Then, I would do a blog entry listing all of the articles submitted with links to them.
   What do you guys think, are you interested in taking part? Let me know in comments, or in e-mail.