10,000

Woo-hoo!!!

Yes indeedy, the number of beady eyes who have chosen to have a quick butchers at the pages of Lesser Blogfordshire has, at last, leapt over that barrier and made it into five figures. Actually, I thought that I would have longer to write this little piece of celebratory nonsense, but a sudden surge of interest from mysterious corners of the United States and Russia made it much more imminent. Still, it is so nice to find that those two countries, between whom relations were once so very tense, can now find such things in common. Although I still suspect they were only being misdirected in their hunts for mistranslated pornography (two nations divided by a common language and a dodgy bit of translation coding), but, nevertheless, it’s common ground and that should be cause for some celebration.

Of course I know that all of this statistical feedback is all nonsense. Until I spotted the “Don’t count your own pageviews” option, it was mostly my own beady eyes that were being drawn here and, very occasionally, I still make the mistake of accessing these pages by means of A.N. Other device and accidentally trip that page counter over a digit or two before I realise what I’m doing, so it’s hardly an accurate measure. Equally, the rinky-dinky faraway computers do also seem very capable of counting the slightest of “pings” from some server or other in another far distant place as being significant enough to count, even though the time spent in Lesser Blogfordshire during those visits amounts to zero seconds of actual interest, whilst ignoring completely any visits made by any members of the “terrific ten” who actual claim to “follow” these musings officially.

Nevertheless, whilst I suppose such a significant moment in the numerical history of these outpourings is of no interest to anyone else, you do know how much I enjoy my “special” numbers and, whilst in the great scheme of things it’s not really a particularly big number, somehow it seems worthy of some kind of recognition, even if it is actually statistically insignificant and bears no actual relationship to any of those who have actually passed by these pages on their way to somewhere more interesting or not, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, to think about it another way, there have now been two and a half times as many page views of the dubious delights of Lesser Blogfordshire as there are holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (according to the Beatles at any rate) although I always remember that line wrongly anyway. Sometimes I think it’s two, sometimes I think it’s actually ten which would have made the comparison slightly more relevant but hugely more inaccurate. Still, as I was born as the nation decreed that “A Hard Day’s Night” was their current most favourite tune, somehow I feel the need to make the comparison, however tenuous it might be.

But nevertheless, as I do enjoy my statistics so very much, it’s probably worth taking a closer look, if only to pay a nostalgic visit to the last days of my degree when we would arrogantly say strange things to each other like “Well, I’m not even going to consider a job that pays less than ten grand a year” (Yes, it was that long ago…) only for people like me to end up burning in Thatcher’s crucible for a couple of years and accept just over seven as a starting salary the best part of two years later.

Well, I’ve finally made it past the ten thousand, Mags, but not in the way I’d hoped. How’s that for “Youth Enterprise”…? Are you impressed with me yet?

Still, it’s not really all that impressive if you look at the numbers more closely, as is always the way with statistics, I suppose. If you take into account that it’s taken sixteen months to get here, or nearly 500 days, that averages out at maybe twenty a day, and we know from the “most popular” listings that three of the titles account for about 1200 all on their own, which means that the remaining 8800 views are split across 460-odd pages and we can also work out that about ten percent of all the viewings that have ever been have been during the last four weeks which means that any views before that were also mathematically unimportant and tend towards zero and… actually, you know, this is all making my head hurt.

Basically, what I think I’m trying to say is that the whole exercise remains statistically insignificant and that every calculation you can make brings us as close to zero as makes no difference, and so, mathematically at least, the whole thing remains fundamentally pointless in the great scheme of things and I can still rest easy in my bed, because I’m not prepared to even get out of bed for less than ten thousand a year…

Or something…

So, to summarise, if only the ten official “followers” listed in the margins of this page had been the people paying any kind of small attention, they would have looked at these pages 1000 times each, or, to put it another way two looks at every single page which is, quite frankly far more than I could realistically expect or deserve any of them to do. That would truly be above and beyond the call of duty. Or you could say that the 460 or so “articles” that I have written (yes, I do call them that, even if nobody else does or should), have each been viewed an average of 20 times each, although as those porn-seekers have boosted certain contributions and given them much higher profiles than they might otherwise have had, those figures can be pretty much ignored and we can rapidly return to a more manageable figure of zero, and, as I know for certain that some others remain unloved, unnoticed and have never been read by anyone else at all, they too also add up to zero.

Which means that a figure of 10,000 is about as near to nothing as makes no difference, and nothing in Lesser Blogfordshire has ever been seen by anyone ever. Therefore anything you think you might have read is simply a figment of your own imagination and nothing at all to do with me, you strange, strange people.

So, as we’re actually talking about nothing at all, it was hardly worth mentioning, then…