Hate Mail, Volume 1

Back during Rich Hailey's episode with Fumento, someone pointed out that Fumento's website traffic was worse than even smaller blogs. Since then, i've noticed fumento has removed his sitemeter.

Alexa rankings were handy but due to abuse are now not that useful.

Is there anyone on the Web more obsessed with hit rates, site rankings, and similar measures than Michael Fumento? This desperate hunger for attention seems to be the single unifying theme throughout all his correspondence. It is probably too late for Michael Fumento, but other bloggers might do well to pay less attention to hits, and more to the quality of their demographics.
Blogger: Is your site frequented heavily by thoughtful readers looking for someone who does actual research on the topic he writes about, or by shallow ideologues looking for a predictably flavored opinion and a cheap wisecrack? (Hint: you may find a correlation between a reader's lack of reflection and a likelihood to use Internet Explorer with Alexa spyware installed.)
The above is not intended to slam unfairly those in the unfortunate situation of living with IE and / or Alexa.
Anyone can make a mistake.
But to make the same mistake over, and over, and over again takes a special talent, and may qualify you to write for Tech Central Station.

While we're on the subject of being obsessed with hit rates, I'll bet that Fumento hasn't taken me up on my offer yet either. I've already shown him in the Fumento Follies post how he could send his own hit rates though the clouds. If this alone makes someone relevant as he believes, I wonder why he's not jumping all over the opportunity.

I'm not sure how Fumento measured your site, but doing the obvious thing reveals that this site is (not surprisingly) way ahead of him.

Alexa toolbar? The further pleasures of using a Mac.

What are "IP fees"?

IP fees are Internet Provider fees, the fees you pay for hosting your web site. Of course, if you have no traffic the fees are negligble so Fumento is making no more sense than usual.

it's abundantly clear to any sentient being that the only person here who "measures his life by 'hits'" is mr fumento. as such, his continued correspondence on the subject shows he has the worst case of projection i've ever seen.

and i once saw a projector.

Aaron,

To be fair, "the obvious thing" shaves off the "cgi.cse" bit. You're comparing the hit rate of the University of NSW against that of Mr. Fumento.

That's... that's a pretty big error, Aaron. Tim's domain vs Fumento's is an exceedingly unfair comparison, given that Fumento.com is presumably Mike's only, but Uni of NSW is definitely not Tim's playground alone.
But hits don't really matter, and certainly have no bearing on truth. If Fumento writes nothing of any value (not unlikely, looking through some of his articles and reviews for his books), then he could get fifty times as many visitors as Tim does, and that wouldn't make what he has to say anymore worthwhile. Fifty times as many clots visiting may look nice in one's weblogs, but when all's said and done, his fans will still be clots, regardless of their allegedly high numbers.

I understand, but I don't see any way to force it to include the cgi.cse bit. Unless I'm missing something, it appears Fumento is just making stuff up...

I imagine that Sideshow Mike is referring to this. Of course, he failed to notice this:

Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant.

Which is, umm, ironic considering Sideshow's arguments against the Lancet study.