Ordinary Nothing

To each their own definition of strange, I suppose. And those definitions often don’t match at all.

One of the things I would consider strange is if a department, inside a company, would decide to start a blog for the purpose of internal department communication, as a sort of group messageboard. Well, it may not sounds incredibly strange presented like that, since group blogs are indeed a way for several people to communicate at the same place. Right?

But what if it’s not a small company, but a department inside a very large company? And what if the blog isn’t private, but public? What if it’s even run inside an external free blog hosting platform like Blogger, and not by the company? What if this mean that the department using it in fact does everything where everyone can see them, and where they have no control over the infrastructure, despite coming from an organization that can certainly afford to hold their own collaboration severs and infrastructure? Ah, now it becomes a bit strange, does it not?

Even more strange, that working like that for about three weeks, this marketing R&D department of Masterfoods USA, among several posts on their blog about their own activities, and several links to outside reports about their company in the media, has just one outbound link to what is an unrelated post on a personal blog. Linking, in fact, to the third of my posts where I go through interesting referrer lines in my log files, because they think that it’s strange.

Strange, right? Even very strange. Left me quite mystified for a while there. I must admit that originally when seeing the post subject of “Dave, this is strange”, it had a very strong flavour of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If the poster had been named Hal, instead of John, I would have been sure I was being had by someone.

Until it hit me, these people probably think all these blog things are a nifty and cool new idea, or something like that, but don’t really get everything involved. It is for example quite possible that they think their Blogger account is private just because they selected not to publish it to search engines, or something of the sort. They won’t be the first, but then again the other cases I encountered were people who did not have a company IT department to consult with.

And with little understanding of web related issues, they may not know what I meant by speaking about a referrer log. In which case I must agree that that post would seem very strange indeed. And of course the reason they hit mine, instead of the myriad other people who cover their own interested referrers caught in their log files, is that this post of mine mentioned something that got caught in a search they ran.

This group is obviously someplace related to their Mars chocolate department, so they may have got there by searching for Mars, or maybe for Cocoavia. And had an understandably hard time understanding my odd sense of humour in a bunch of seemingly unrelated topics.

Well, John and Dave, if you get to this post as well, here’s a short explanation about referrers. When you click on a link inside a web page, your web browser (That’s the program used to see web pages, Internet Explorer in your case, I’d expect) goes and fetches that new page to show you. So far so good, right? Well, when it does that, the request that goes to the new website, asking for the page on the link, also contains other information besides the link you request. One of these bits of information is the page that you are coming from, where the link exists. This is passed in what is called a referrer header of the request.

And what is that good for, why do people check these? It’s interesting to know where and how people got to your page. So many websites, including lone blog operators (and your own website admin in the company, if they talk to Marketing, and have a clue), tend to go over their server logs, or other statistic providers they use, and see things like what pages people wanted to see, and what was the referrer. That is how I got to your blog, because someone (Dave?) clicked the link there to get here, and so your blog came as referrer.

The main use for that is the search engines. When people run a search in a search engine, the keywords searched are listed in the result page URI, which is then passed as referrer. And it’s interesting to see what did people searched for to get to your page. And this is what these referrer log roundups of mine, and many others, cover. All the highlighted lines there are what people actually went and searched for on places like Google or Yahoo search.

I hope that helped. It’s certainly been a strange experience all around.

June 6th, 2005 at 2:26 EET | Categories: Business, Weblogs | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.