Woodstock CT Café

This is what Cafe visitation looks like for the month of January 2010 (graphs below). The most deceiving statistic is the number of “unique visitors”. This is every unique IP (Internet path/protocol) that visits the Cafe. I am able to look at the visitors to the Cafe who have turned the most pages (by clicking the title, “more” or the comments). The thousandth visitor turned 6 pages in January. Thus, this could be a legitimate visitor from Senegal who actually reads something, or it could be someone down the road who only has a causal interest in reading at the Cafe. The point here is that this class of visitors is not ‘in and out’. The more telling stats are the total number of visitors and total page turns in January which are for-the-most-part due to repeat visitors.

The table that shows where most of the visitors came from shows a large Russian contingent. While we can dismiss these visitors as being Woodstock relevant, they are turning pages and their page turns are not due to spam (which is tallied separately as “non-viewing”). Almost 40,000 of the 72,000 page turns in January came from the USA (mostly CT); but we have visitors from most of the countries of the world accounting for the other 32,000 page turns.

We are getting referrals from non-search engine URLs like Rich Green’s page at the Hartford Courant and other CT websites such as CT Local Politics. Most of our visitors are from the US and Connecticut, but visitors come from other parts of the country to see what’s happening in Woodstock, including my son Drew in Dallas and Mariah in Virginia Beach. Then, of course, there’s the Aussie who went back to Australia and the Horse eater in southern France.

Internet traffic has declined to blogs over that last year. This is a general phenomenon not exclusive to the Cafe. As you can see in the lower set of graphs, total page turns have been steady for the last ten months with the exception of a busy June 2009 because of the referendums. Five pages is the average per visit but >1000 are turning 6 pages per visit.

I am continually amazed by the stability of Cafe visitation. If the Russians, Germans, Canadians, and others are turning pages, then I’m okay with that; but it’s the Woodstockians and surrounding communities that matter the most and we will never forget this!

by Newcomer

Your first statement (in your post #38) summarizing how I feel about this is a bit off (this is to Taxpayer). On a National level, I do feel that the political parties have separated themselves from the people they are supposed to represent. However, your second thought is not my conclusion about this; namely that “therefore the people can somehow be vanquished from taking any responsibility for their government.” This is an incorrect characterization about my position on this. In fact, I feel completely that the opposite is true. Because there is such a disconnect between the political parties and society at large, the people who are not part of this machine must come together collectively to exert their influence upon their elected officials and the political parties whom those officials represent.

Politicians like to tell us all about how they represent us when they are campaigning. But then they get into office and owe their party and so many special interests favors for getting them elected that the people end up at the bottom of the totem pole. The people need to stop tolerating this. We need to stop allowing our elected officials to put our interests last instead of first. And, no, I do not have much confidence that this can be done from the inside out (from within a political party). It’s too late for that. Both parties have grown too wealthy and too powerful and they are now locked in a power struggle with one another. This can only be done at the grass roots level, in my opinion.

You mentioned the tea party movement in a different post elsewhere in this thread. I think that movement needs to exercise caution at this point. Read the rest of this entry »