I don’t know much about blogging, though I do read a couple.
I’m not very computer savy and am curious. I’m sure bloggers have some way of knowing how many hits their blog is getting, as in, how many times it’s been viewed.
Do bloggers have any way of knowing who is reading their blog? If I access my ex husbands (don’t really have one, just a hypothetical) blog to see what he’s up to, will he know I was reading his blog? Or will he just know it’s getting 5 hits a day or whatever?
Depends where your blog is hosted. I have mine hosted on my own website, so I get to see all sorts of traffic analysis - including unique visitors, although the chance of identifying someone through their IP address alone is remote, and that’s the only information that’s recorded by my stats. Unless he knew your IP address and had access to this information, he wouldn’t know.
I don’t think common blogging sites give you traffic breakdown like this, but I could be wrong there. AFAIK, he would only get number of readers (and maybe not even that).
Lots of bloggers set up a third-party tracking site. I use Sitemeter, myself.
It’s not totally specific on who’s reading the blog, but you can get a vague idea of location and their ISP, which narrows it down sometimes. Most of the time; AOL seems to come up very generically. If you follow an external link to get to the blog, the blog owner can usually see that too.
If you’re accessing his site through a corporate server, then the name of the company will come up. If he knows you work there, he’ll probably assume it’s you.
Also, the “location” information is often not exactly correct. When I log onto my own site, I know it’s me but the stats often give a town 20 miles or more away as the location. I have a friend who reads mine and her own town is never given in the stats: it always says the next town over. It’s probably where the ISP routing is from or somesuch.
Also, FYI, the site owner can often see (depending on the features of his stat program) what OS you are using (Mac or PC and which exact OS), which browser, what search terms you used to get to that site, and your in-click (meaning which page you were on before on which you clicked a link to his site) and which page of his site you leave from (the out-click). I was a little surprised that so much info was available.