JSH: Measuring newsgroup impact

Now that I'm winding down from new math research I'm focusing more on
side details like measuring the impact of posts on the newsgroups on
things like statistics of hit counts on my math blog, and I thought it
worth sharing some of the information.

For instance, in the past 6 months according to Google Analytics my
math blog has hits from 80 countries, though the bulk of the hits come
from Great Britain, with the city giving the most hits being London.

According to Google Analytics, the hits coming from what I'll call
hostile sources, being the crank.net website and newsgroups through
groups.google.com are 10.12% of the total, where crank.net has 6.02%
and groups.google.com has 4.10% which is invaluable information to me
because it has shown me that hostile posts here have nominal impact in
terms of actually driving people from links on negative sources to my
math blog.

Which is why I'm posting as I think it's a hoot.

Hostile posters who I've seen at times making it a point to link to
negative sites have had a nominal impact based on the evidence I have
available, and thankfully, crank.net is a non-force in terms of hit
counts.

The hate page is not getting the attention I'm sure it's creator
intended, so now it's more of a humorous thing to me to note that and
consider what it means about the Internet and how interest is drawn or
not drawn by particular tactics.

On a side note, I continue to use search results from the major search
engines to gain some sense of my overall worldwide influence, and as
it has every year, it is growing.

I now consider the academic journal process to be irrelevant to my
needs and it is no longer necessary for me to even consider
publication in any math journal at any level.

I can simply go direct, publi****ng as I choose, what I choose, when I
choose.


James Harris