I am sure I have mentioned this before but if you are not playing with Google Analytics real time beta thingie you really are missing a huge time suck opportunity. Posting something usually requires a bit of patience and more often than not a small feeling of throwing a few pages of hand writing off a cliff and into the sea hoping someone somewhere reads it. Now, instead, you can see who is reading what you wrote to a fairly good degree of certainty and then watch them not post a comment. Or leave in seven seconds after checking out what you wrote. It has graphs and maps and lists and all sorts of fun. And it comes with moving parts. Circles appear and disappear on the map without making a sound telling you where people are. For example, someone in Needham Massachusetts is reading a post I wrote in 2003 about a tavern in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Neato. Someone in Fordingbridge England just followed a tweet I posted. Was it you?

It certainly leads to the question "why" but that is the quiet voice all we bloggers hear at all hours if we listen quietly for a minute. Once you get past that it sure is compelling - unless of course they are sapping my hard drive and my will to go on... but never mind that. It sure is pretty to watch go by.