Don’t Count Me (dot com)
Actually when it says pre-Alpha, I think it’s more like pre-vapourware, but this is an open call to all the inventors and brilliant people out there.
Will someone please invent a web-hit-deleter.
A few times recently (in fact twice today alone) I’ve visited a website and then wished I could retract my traffic figures from its logs. (Maybe I’m particularly grumpy today).
I don’t want to be a ‘unique user’. And I don’t want anyone to mistakenly attribute my stupidly hanging around to see if anything meaningful would happen as some kind of ‘dwell time’.
What I want is a ‘pretend I never came here button’.
Surely The Internet, as the all-measurable media, can afford me such a facility…?
I can’t stand the fact that I leave an unquestioning vapour-trail of ROI behind me. I want to choose which sites feel the benefit of my visits and more importantly which ones don’t.
I also want a feature where I can send on a link to people to tell them to go and look at a site, but put a sort of cloaking device around them so that they don’t add to the site’s ROI either. At the moment if I send a link round the office telling folk about a bad piece of work I know that I’m generating valuable unique users.
So here’s my offer.
If anyone wants to build such a thing they can have the domain name dontcountme.com for free, yes free. Totally free. I own it and to be honest I’m never going to use it.
I’ve got no idea how to build the thing that does what I want it to do, but I’ve had a few thoughts:
- It could either be a server installable thing that people choose to add to their sites in the name of fair play and honesty with their stats (like that’s going to happen!)
- It could be like an inverse Stumble Upon or Digg – where site owners can proudly display how many people didn’t dig their site ;-)
- More likely though it needs to be something that sort of exerts a subtle kind of pressure on site owners to look more honestly at their stats. And we all know we’re a little bit guilty of some subtle stats-manipulation from time to time…
It’s probably a stupid idea. But if someone wants to take it on as a project (even a novelty project) let me know and I’ll let you have the domain name (for free).
I know that what I’ve just written is a really stupid, elaborate, and long-winded way of saying that unique-users, hits and dwell times (especially in the day of the semi-infinite loading bar) are actually a load of old cobblers. But that domain is there for the taking ;-)