Yes, I’m serious. Why are you reading this blog entry? Here on the blogs, we regularly get into discussions about why people blog. Yet we don’t often seem to talk about why we read other people’s blogs. Let’s take a little time to explore this.

Some of us spend time pouring over our access logs to try and figure out how people found the website. I’ve done a little checking into around half a million access records for my site. 97.5% of them don’t have any referrer records. So, a lot of the ways people find the site just aren’t showing up. Of the records that do show up, about 1% are from Google. And about half of a percent come from BlogExplosion. MyBlogLog comes in third as a source of readily identifiable sources.

Yet this leaves all kinds of questions. Within Google, it is easy to find the search terms that bring people to the site. “Smoking Jacket” and “Drupal Themes” are the two most popular search terms bringing people to my site. Why are these so popular? I suspect some of it is because there aren’t a lot of other things written about smoking jackets and drupal themes.

BlogExplosion is a pretty straight forward click exchange. They send people to Orient Lodge based on the number of sites that I visit through BlogExplosion. Most users just come to Orient Lodge randomly according to BlogExpolsion’s selection criteria.

MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and BumpZEE are more interesting. If you came here through one of them, how did you get here? Did you click on my link on a widget on someone else’s blog? Did you start off at their front page? Did you follow links from your community or friends? Did you arrive at my MyBlogLog page some other way? If you did click on my link on a widget, what made you click on my link instead of someone else’s link?