Word of the day.....
Paranoia
1 : a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations
2 : a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others
Today's paranoia is brought to you by StatCounter. For those not familiar, it's a free web tracker that you can put on your blog invisibly to see who's visiting and from where. It's not 100% reliable, but it gives you a general idea.
Originally I didn't have any web tracking devices on my blog because I do write this for myself and no one else. So I really didn't care who was visiting, or even if anyone was visiting. Sure it's nice to know people are reading, but that isn't really why I began this whole project in the first place.
Anyway, after reading other blogs that mentioned "how neat" this StatCounter thing was, I figured I'd give it a go, because well, I'm really fucking nosy sometimes. Plus curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to see if anyone, besides those that leave comments, was reading this stupid thing. I rarely remember to even look at their site to see what they've tracked on my blog, but I did today...hence the paranoia.
I see states familiar to me showing up. States and cities where I have relatives or online buddies & acquaintances from another forum that I would not want reading all this. Seeing that makes me paranoid that those nameless ISP addresses have familiar faces behind them. Faces of those that would use this information against me. Some that would love to ostracize me or find some way to insult me for being mentally ill solely because of their own ignorance and fear of the subject.
There is also one person who keeps checking up on me on another site I frequent. In fact they haven't even read this blog in the last week or so, but instead now have another path by which to find me and they use that round-a-bout way. Makes me paranoid because I don't know if this person is friend or foe.
Am I an idiot for putting all this information out in such a public format that it is available to everyone and anyone, even those I don't want reading it? Probably. Should I rethink what the hell I'm doing here? Probably. Do I need to remove the StatCounter from my site? Probably. But not tonight. Right now I'm tired as hell for being up 19 hours after only 5 hours of sleep the night before.
4 Comments:
I really worry about people I know finding my blog and reading it. I try not to use names or specific details but at the same time I tell the truth on there too and if someone was actually trying to hunt me down online they probably wouldn't have much difficulty. Oddly, I feel safer spilling my guts on the internet than I would to anyone in my so-called real life. The chances of my husband finding my blog are a lot slimmer than him finding my diary or something laying around the house. Plus I guess I just like getting feedback from strangers LOL
you can put a line of html in your template that tells search engines not to include your blog during keyword searches. i did that with mine, because i'd get a lot of visitors from google and yahoo and so forth that typed in completely unrelated keywords and got my blog address. it's not 100%, but it has almost eliminated the amount of unrealted hits i get to my blog.
here's the link to the code if you want it : http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41957&topic=8922
Oh girl, I have lots of experience with this one! I don't think you have anything to worry about though, your name isn't on here, at least I haven't seen it on here. So I wouldn't stress about it any more. And the stat counter is a great source of info just to see who is reading and how many hits you're getting. Don't waste any of your time frettin' about anything else, and don't change anything you're doing on account of what you feel others "may be" doing.
I think technological induced paranoia is an underrated phenom. Many bloggers feel this way too, including me.
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