Thursday, June 11, 2009

Real-time Traffic Report: Really Invasive?

About a week ago, I installed a new widget on my blog from FEEDJIT that shows a real-time feed of traffic to this site along with where the visitor came from and what content they viewed. See it there at the bottom of my right hand rail?

You can also view a more thorough feed that shows what browser and OS each visitor's on along with their country and city, the page they arrived on, and the website they left to.

At first I thought it was neat-o to see where people where coming from and what they were looking at.

For example, last week I wrote a quick slug about how Bing is not much different than Google. Since that time, I've noticed quite a few people arriving from queries like "how is Bing different from Google" and "difference between Bing and Google," even "Bing is entirely different than proposed." Pretty cool to see people seem to agree with my POV.

I've also seen quite a bit of traffic on my SEO experiment for my post, "LinkedIn Blackberry application" via queries of the same name. (As far as I know, there still isn't one!)

That said, I do feel a little weird about this app. exposes some personally-identifiable queries. Over time, I've referenced certain people in my posts and rank well for queries with their names. This feed shows when people are Googling themselves or someone else is Binging them, leading to my site.

Now, of course, all this data is available to me via Google Analytics but by using this app. it's also available now to anyone that visits my blog.

What do you think? Does this app. cross the privacy line? Should I remove it?

Crossing the Line

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