Let Bloggers Know What Brings You to Their Posts!

I have been blogging for probably about a decade. I speculate that most bloggers spend a significant amount of effort writing relative to the amount of feedback that they receive. I could try to blame copying, caching, reductions in client-side tracking, but in addition to not getting many comments, my blogs do not even record much traffic. Making it a habit to comment with information like this could improve the quality of blogs in general. Most of what I blog about are things that I would like to remember myself, but expect to forget almost immediately and then need again some day, although sometimes I also forget that wrote a post about something. Comments also help bloggers remember to update and expand on existing content.

The analytics that my blogs do record seems to be decreasingly useful over time. Search engines stopped passing the query terms as parameters in inbound links long ago. An increasing number of web clients seem to be configured not to indicate even the referring site. There are patterns in the data, but they are hard to decipher based on the limited and unreliable information available. To assist in this analysis, I think that any or all of the following information would be very useful to bloggers.

• What brought you to the blog either this time or the first time?
  • If you clicked a link, where did the link come from?
  • If you searched, which search engine did you use, and what search term did you enter?
• What were you hoping to read, and did you find it?
• Did you notice any significant errors or broken links, or language that seemed confusing?
• What additional questions would you hope for this post to answer, or what additional links could it provide?
• Is this your first time reading this blog?
• If you have been here before, do you read regularly?
• What would you like to see on this blog?

This may seem like a lot to ask, especially since commenting on a blog generally requires readers to authenticate, but I think that almost any blogger would greatly appreciate any of these details.

Even though I do not expect any comments on this blog post, thanks in advance!