* * * * *
                                        
                             The author robots love
                                        
> Chances are that you are reading this because you found a reference to this
> web page from your web server logs. This reference was left by
> Turnitin.com's web crawling robot, also known as TurnitinBot. This robot
> collects content from the Internet for the sole purpose of helping
> educational institutions prevent plagiarism. In particular, we compare
> student papers against the content we find on the Internet to see if we can
> find similarities. For more information on this service, please visit
> www.turnitin.com [1] 
> 

TurnitinBot General Information Page [2] 

It's a bit sobering to realize I'm getting about a thousand hits per day (so
far this month) but that eight to nine hundred of those are various robots
[3] out there, indexing my site. 

I think I can now understand where someone could get 10,000 page views and
4,000 visits [4] (not to say their counts are wrong—I just think the software
they're using may not take into account robots). Last month I got over 13,000
page views but … taking out the robots, I'm left with 2,235 human viewed (for
the most part) pages. 

I mean, I'm flattered that robots like my site and all that but still … 

[1] http://www.turnitin.com/
[2] http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html
[3] http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/04/09.3

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.