The whole concept of actually serving up information is pretty much dead these days. Glitz over content and all that garbage. While I do try to keep some content on my pages, I'm as guilty as anyone else when it comes to wanting more hits. I'd like to think that somebody reads these rants of mine, for instance.

I recently posted a pointer to Bruce Campbell's page, to slashdot.org (a major traffic generator), and hoped to get a little traffic to my page off of it, too, but it doesn't look like that's happened. How do I know?

Well, angelar.com uses Apache (who doesn't?), which keeps nice thorough logs of who is hitting what, and from where. Nothing intrusive, mind you--I don't, for example, learn each reader's mother's maiden name--but I do learn what IP address they hit from, and what they were looking for.

I'm appalled. The only two reasons anyone came here were for sex and death. You'd think I was some sort of Goth hangout here, except my colors were too bright, and I'm not depressed enough.

Sex and death, you say? Where are those? I thought you'd ask. The sex was represented by a page on Why Plastic Surgery is Usually Silly (complete with pictures of Pam Anderson--the page has since been removed), and death is represented by my Senior Thesis (that's college, wise guy), Genesis of a Serial Killer.

My plastic surgery page isn't even all that up-to-date. I've yet to put up a note saying the following:

Pamela Anderson Lee, distraught over the scathing commentary on my page, recently elected to have her implants removed. Note that she still has pretty large knockers.

I don't forsee my senior paper having the same kind of effect on anyone, though it has been used lots and lots of times--once or twice even in a community college curriculum! And, I got published in a compendium of research on serial killers and satanic crime. Ironically, satanic crime (as many people would have you believe) does NOT exist in that way. There is NO international, multi-generational satanic cult which engages in ritual physical and sexual abuse in addition to the sacrifice of human babies.

Quite the opposite really--I've never met a satanist face-to-face who seemed capable of tying his own shoes correctly, three times in a row. They seem to be not all that together, as people go. But I digress.

Sex and death. Death and sex. Blood and tits. Well, isn't that just American Culture in a nutshell? The exploitation films of the late '70s and early '80s are still around, though thankfully not quite the vogue that they were. For at least one generation, though, violence and sex was thoroughly bonded into one unholy fetish. I find it unlikely that those people are hitting my web pages.

And for those of you that have made it this far, I get to the real moral of the last paragraph: Correlation is Not Causation. Just because I get lots of hits on my serial killer page, and on my plastic surgery page does not mean any of the following:

• People are only interested in those two subjects. (while it would appear that way, only research could bear out this hypothesis. It may simply be that those are the only two portions of my page that are well-linked to search engines.)
• The same people who hit the serial killer page also hit the plastic surgery page. (In fact, that theory is pretty much dismissed by the log data.)
• That data from hits on my web site could be extrapolated to the net as a whole.

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