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4 km from Weber St meansic o0 PiaGGiO® #4p vESPa® aBE 15 anC woORLDWw De AEGISTEAEC Thabehanks of ThE pacGC Sa0u? of COMPaÂ¥ E aBe » . oc & . rhaldic, Sn Tv i aW5 AND ALWAYS whan 4 HELVET adpRoPRiaTF ie »Ewhan ano e@oren abbanti. GaS yi baGE vame e PE4DNS 0n whiGeT. SBEED A4D A DING COND TiONS . °C 4 C See store tor details Zero Down â€"_ No Payments No Interest for 6 months* What do they really want? MA C Visa N. Waterloo on Benjamin Road Debit 699â€"5000 Finatly®* A Christmay Iree Stand That Works T. Satisfactien coutatitren §34 98 to last a itetitnie T TREE FARM AND GIFT SHOP uPy commpure BENJAMIN with the largest selection of German specialties Vist us Sundays in December for Special Holiday lastings To give you some festive ideas for the holiday season, Denninger‘s will be sampling hot imulled wine, fine imported chocolates, pralines, gingerbread, Christmas cake, stollen and cookies. Don‘t forget Denninger‘s gourmet gift baskets and gift certificates. Celebrates Christmas ] watched over the weekâ€" end as visitors came in about every five minutes and quickly made my odd little posting the allâ€"time, mostâ€"viewed page on my site. If I‘m a little obsessed about statistics, at least 1 know I‘m not alone in the online world. There‘s nearly an indusâ€" iry built around software and services that will slice and dice a web server‘s logs to tell you where people are coming from by country or network address, what web browser they were using and which operating system they were running on their computer. As a business, you can track how effective a marâ€" keting campaign was by the activity for a web page on your corporate site, or you could determine if bloggers or other such sites are leadâ€" ing readers to your site. However interesting. I‘ve come to learn that I can‘t take the numbers too seriâ€" ously. Many of the "hits" (or web page requests! on a web site are not from peoâ€" ple, but are from other comâ€" puter programs. There are far too many automated "attacks" being made by automated proâ€" grams orchestrated by spammers to abuse busiâ€" ness and personal systems for their own purposes. These spam attempts can at times make up a good portion of a web site‘s accesses if your traffic is normally low, and can cerâ€" tainly skew the numbers if you are keeping a close eye MICHAEL HIEMSTRA Webâ€"based reader softâ€" ware such as Bloglines.com, reader.google.com {now in beta testing}, and the My Yahoo! home page all make regular requests of your site if visitors choose this type of method to read your site. More people could be reading your sites content than you realize, since a feed allows other sites to aggregate content and disâ€" tribute it from a central location. One activity that is more fun than actuarial, is to watch what searches are being made on your web site or what search engine queries lead people to your web site. 1 have the two words "perth" and "meteor" to thank for the recent spike in access on my web site, as my blog posting appeared on the first page of many Internet search engine queries for these. Some of the major search engines themselves keep track of how people use their services. For instance. Google manages a page called Google Zeitgeist that tracks "Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google." Here you can see what the past week‘s 15 most popular searches were, or see which celebrities, news stories, retail stores or conâ€" cepts were common. Google maintains these statistics as far back as 2001. Yahoo! also has a similar page called the "Yahoo! Buzz Index" which tracks popular queries for actors, movies, sports, televiston and video games. A quick survey of these two sites at the time of writâ€" ing shows that "50 cent is near the top of Internet surfery minds, the lyries for Rent are sought after. and the NHL is hot m the world of sports While the major search engines have their finger on the pulse of Internet searchers across the world. and the spammers might he trying to take advantage of your site, watching the trends and statisties for your web server could he imfor mative at the least, and it might even be fun. For more "Bits of Life" codum ns risif mghiemstra comicolumn or read Michael‘s blog at mghiemstra comibstsoffife for other sqigresing hy in,