Reflections on LLB's 1,000,000th Page View

Sometime today Law Librarian Blog should receive its 1,000,000th page view. It's a milestone I have been looking forward to but I don't exactly know why. Except as a marketing metric for advertisers, traffic stats tell us nothing about a blog's influence and it's contributions to our profession and for those outside our profession who are interested in providing or gaining access to information on the web. In the early days of this blog, I guess I just want to know whether anyone "out there" had found LLB.

It's not an uncommon interest. None other than Tim Berners-Lee started logging page accessions to the planet's first web server, info.cern.ch, in the summer of 1991. If the person who cooked up the web wondered about traffic stats, I guess it is OK for the rest of us too. But let's not make too much about traffic stats. In his Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee mentions traffic growth on CERN's web server only three times and the book's indexer didn't think the topic deserved indexing.

I know bloggers who check their traffic stats every day, several times a day even. It can be quite an obsession. I've succumbed to it from time to time but it is an urge well worth resisting. Just post and establish a web destination by doing so regularly. Visitors will find the blog via search engines and some will turn into regular readers.

About law library/law librarian blogs, Dennis Kennedy writes "across the board, these blogs have developed into strong information resources, often with links to primary source information that I'm not sure how I would find otherwise." While Ron Jones, our great team of contributing editors, and I thank you for making our efforts worthwhile by visiting LLB, why not also check out some of the other 140 law library/law librarian blogs today if you haven't already done so. Here's Bonnie Shucha's Directory. Together, law library/law librarian blogs are creating a valuable information space for users of legal resources. [JH]