Yes it has been quiet, certainly it is just the holiday season--not a lack of interest.

Yes, there is a way to track readers, but it is rather time consuming and earthlink has to agree to do it.

When TCT first launched, I was Christopher's and Olga's intern. Our generous sponsor, Earthlink, provided us with a throughput report (I think that is what they called it). During the first week of TCT's public exisitance, it had been quietly existing off of pipsqueaks site for months, we were list as Yahoo's AND Infi's cool site of the day, on the same day! Earthlink eMailed the throughput list and we had 62,000 hits on that day.

Now 62,000 hits is impressive (we danced around the kitchen and whooped and hollered), but just because someone comes to the front page doesn't mean they stick around to read. When we read the tracking for the other pages of the site the numbers dropped significantly. I only remember the numbers for The Anonymous Faxer (Ooops, my ego is showing). Of 62,000 front page hits, only 74 viewed any the anonymous faxer work, of the 74 only 6 went all the way through the six art pieces that were on line at the time.

The hit report is HUGE and and pouring over it is fascinating but a real time sucker-upper. This and the fact that Earthlink isn't supplying that service any longer make tracking difficult. The only way to track an individual writers fandom would be to place a hit counter on each new session. This would be way to much work for Olga and Christopher, who work TCT for free. and then room for the counter would have to be found in the interface, so the interface would need to be redesigned and that ain't gonna happen.

Sorry this got so long, but it is a complicated issue.

Karen a.k.a. 42 down