In the comments to my post, Is City Council Ignoring You? another local blogger, polifrog left the following comment:
"Reading you via my feed leaves few tracks on your site, so I thought I'd take a moment and compliment you on your work, Billy.
Good work..."
To which I replied:
"Thanks Froggy, City Council seems unaware that thanks to people like you and others my readership is actually about 20 times what is reflected in my site meters. Oh well, their loss come election day."
You see, what City Council and others might not be aware of is the fact that the site meter visible to everyone does not and cannot display everyone who reads this blog. When Dave Winer invented RSS he gave bloggers such as myself a free means to syndicate our content to anyone who wants to read it at no charge to blogger or reader. This means that people like Polifrog are actually reading every word I write without visiting this website except when they feel the need to comment.
Sites like Greensboro101.com publish my content in it's entirety with my approval. Jeri Johnson's Greensboro Aggregator publishes excerpts as does Greensboro News, Topix, Google Blogs and hundreds of others. Any and all are welcome to scrape, copy and paste or reproduce in any way as long as they link back to the source.
Then there's the personal RSS readers like Polifrog was talking about. While I can track the aggrigators I can't even begin to track how many people read via the various personal news readers installed on their computers and hand held devices. What? you didn't know people were reading this site on their Smartphones and other Internet equipped devices?
So when you look at that tiny number up there in the top left corner and start to laugh, remember the following: That number is about 1/20 of the actual readership or less. The people who read this site are most likely to vote in an election. And in an off year election those numbers are well more than enough to change who gets seated on the Greensboro City Council.
And being I only started this blog in January 2012, just think how big that number will be by November 2013.
Remember: Click Here To Show Your Support and thanks to all of you who are silently working behind the scenes with no hope of reward other that the hope that someday we will take our city back.
