Blog Analytics - I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watchin' Me

Remember that Michael Jackson song 'Somebody's Watching Me'? The paranoid lyrics from that song come to mind as I look at the data Statcounter collects for me on visitors to my blog. More for learning and curiousity's sake than anything else I put Statcounter in place several months ago, and it has since blown my mind to see what people search for who end up at my site; some choice examples of queries people have recently searched to get to my blog:

'Efficient Frontier Chris Zaharias' - someone from Basra, Iraq oddly enough
'Adwords haiku'
'GOOG's accounting' - I had written about Google mistakenly inverting exchange rates in international AdSense payouts
'sem-tea' - probably someone looking for 'stem tea' & who made a typo
'zidane head butt' - I wrote an entry on Zinedine Zidane's head-butt in the World Cup final, and that entry got more hits than anything I've ever written on SEM
'Chris Zaharias married' - maybe my wife's checking to see if I have a 2nd wife overseas...

With access to data on what was searched for, what geography, what search engine and what pages were viewed I can sometimes even figure out who the individual person was who came to my blog if I had a conversation with that person recently. It's a strange yet satisfying feeling to have that kind of data, and I can imagine how 5-10 years down the line individuals with MySpace pages, blogs and the like will make personal web analytics a killer app of sorts.

After all, don't we all feel like we're being watched? And don't we all want to know who's watching us?