Back to blogging, again
It’s been a busy couple of weeks since last I blogged. The social psychology class I’m teaching is nearing its end, something I’m sure to write more about soon enough. I turned the blog entries I wrote in March about Social Psychology’s Essence into a short article I sent off to a journal. I’ve been working on some options for the fall when the new academic year starts. All in all, it’s been busy, while events to comment upon come and go.
Still, despite my lack of input, my site statistics show increasingly large numbers of visitors. Yet I see no real sign of anyone paying attention to this blog. There are almost no actual comments by real people, but sometimes I get dozens, even hundreds, of spam comments that I manage to keep from appearing here, but which must raise my stats to respectable rates.
The spam could go to my head. Lots of nice compliments, like “I really like this blog — Thanks!!” (along with a link to a gambling site). “You make a good point, but I’m not sure you’ve taken everything into account” (porn). “This is full of useful information — I will be sure to bookmark it!” (Viagra).
I wonder how much spam inflates web statistics in general, along with the googlebots and similar cataloging efforts and the searches that bring people to a site for the fraction of a second it takes to realize it’s not really relevant to what they want. How many people actually stay and read something? Don’t know.