lies, damned lies and statistics

In the first 13 minutes of 20 April 2006, there was a single hit on this blog (no names, no pack-drill). Curiously, the recently added WordPress feed statistics reported a surprising and rather unlikely number of 53 ’estimated number of people who used certain tools to read your feed’ in the same period.

Now this is simply not true. Most of these 53 ‘people’ were RSS spiders and automatons dumbly and repeatedly polling for any activity. The associated human being is probably down the pub or asleep.

While the RSS feed may have been subscribed to at some point (by me in all probability) in the past, they are all now sitting unloved and unread in a still born Web 2.0 beta account.