Shaping Blogs or Micro Blogs, surely not!

I came across this post a while ago, I think through twitter by Joost de Val where he shows how to get Google Analytics to track links that come through twitter, since the bulk of twitter is not via the web, so Analytics will make it look like all those hits are direct traffic.

With this information you are  now better able to track your twitter users through you pages, as they may behave differently to readers from other sources. This I am sure is going to help people mine their data considerably better.

But should you be doing this ? …really.

Perhaps if you are a company, and you are using twitter as advertising space, and you need to be able to calculate your return on investment in spending time tweeting, this makes some financial sense.. but still.

As an individual blogger or twitter, I can understand the keen interest you have in seeing stat on things like Google Analytics or Google WebMaster Tools, because with the exception of comments that is really the only feedback you get – but surely it should just be feedback.

Here is my concern, what do you do with the information ?
As a individual blogger, if you start to use that information to shape the content of the blog, well then who is really editing your blog… yes you may be writing it, with all the knowledge, humour and skill that you have, but you are not the editor, and that for me seems to weaken the concept of a blog.

If I am wrong, then I think something like Skribit will do really well : “a content suggestion service helping bloggers discover relevant topics to write about from their readers.”

Just because I understand the financial reasons for a business to analyse the behaviour and source of their traffic, that does not mean that I think it makes it the right decision.

Yes you may lose out on traffic in the short term, because I am sure there are great minds careful analysis behind these decision ( which sounds like advertising to me )  but, that price you pay upfront  for the integrity that you gain when YOU blog, where you are either an individual or a company.