“I’ve been everywhere, man.”

– Johnny Cash

There are times that I just don’t know how to count.

My little Feedburner counter says there are some 61 people or so who care enough about what I have to say that they want it pushed to them. (Or they care so little about it they don’t want to expend the energy to come here to see it.)

Yet, when I look at where these readers are, and how they get here, it’s a little mind-boggling:

Sitemeter

Out of the last 25 readers (prior to this post,) I have representation from Canada, France, Finland, and Denmark. I have Raleigh-Duke, Chicago, Brooklyn, Miami, and Sacramento. And then there are the various ways they find me here:

  • Brooklyn got here by Googling “Ike Pigott”
  • Clichy, France is on my Feedburner feed
  • Linn Creek followed my Twitter feed
  • New York City – a Bloglines subscriber
  • Sacramento came via my LinkedIn profile
  • Arlington – a Bloglines subscriber, through the Army/Air Force Exchange

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered, or scared. If there are only a smattering of people sampling Occam’s RazR, and they are so scattered in their geography and arrival points, then am I not focused enough as a communicator? And if I add in the number of people I know who say they follow my blog, do those numbers get reflected in my readership? What do the numbers mean, anyway?

As it happens, there is a huge internal debate raging in the world of online communications. The practitioners of marketing measurement voodoo are close to giving up. They used to make up a formula, and that was fine, because even an alchemist’s experiments were repeatable, and had value as a point of comparison. But how should I feel if some other writer has twice as many subscribers? Is that a measure of being twice as good? Or having bee online twice as long? Or having a subject matter that is twice as appealing?

What it boils down to is influence. We all want to know what kind of impact we make. There’s a little piece of ego in every blog post, an internal core of “Hey! Look what I thought up!” There’s nothing wrong with that at all. My fear is that as we (as a collective) try to cope with the great information glut, we’ll start flocking to what is popular instead of what is good. If there is a recipe site with 100 subscribers, it can’t be as good as the one with 10,000, can it? Because there’s no time to sample it all for ourselves, we supplant personal experience with some type of objective measurement. For the sake of saving time, we replace intelligence with the Wisdom of Crowds. Wisdom of Crowds gives us things that are popular, not necessarily good. Those who try to follow the Wisdom of Crowds knocked Firefly and Arrested Development off the air, and left us with more reality shows and Law and Order clones.

So again, I don’t know what to think. I’ve tried to capture some stats on how many people come by, and how they get here. It helps guide me, with feedback on what messages resonate with all of you. The comments help too, both in terms of what you say and how you link back. A couple of my posts must have rung true elsewhere, because several people have pointed back. My gut tells me that comments are the surest indicator of influence and community – but as soon as I say it, someone will develop a new “metric” to analyze the comments. “Was it a substantive contribution, or an attaboy? Did they spread the idea on their own page? How far did it reach?”

Sadly – more people will be chasing internet vapor trails in real time, trying to catch “influence” as it happens – than smiling with wonder at a world where ideas can travel at the speed of light, and a guy like me can be bigger in Europe than in my neighborhood.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, blogging, influence, public relations, online communications, measurement, Twitter, LinkedIn[/tags]