I’ve been poring over statistics for visitors who come to my Lingamish blog. I’m really geeky on this stuff and I’m not sure why. I was an English major. I’m a musician and I like poetry. You’d think stats would be something I wouldn’t get all tingly about but you just never know with some folks, do you?

The clearest indication that I get from studying the statistics on my blog is that the number of visitors to my blog plummets on the weekends. The flip side of this is that people are reading this stuff at work. If it were a leisure at-home kind of activity you’d expect the numbers to be similar for weeknight vs. weekend. But they’re not. In fact, the numbers plummet predictably and regularly on Saturday and pick up again on Monday.

Now here’s the effect of my blog on the world’s economy:

My blog on WordPress has been viewed 46,283 times since August 2006. If we imagine that it takes 2 minutes to read a page on my blog that is 46,283*2=92,566/60=1,542 hours spent by the world’s office workers reading my blog when they should be working. If we assume that the average Internet-connected worker is costing their employer about $25/hour, then I am responsible for more than $38,550 in lost wages by skilled workers. And that’s only if somebody reads a post on my blog and gets right back to work. So I’m costing the world’s employers about $3,500 per month because of my blogging activities.

That’s big bucks! If we could somehow agree that I wouldn’t blog anymore and instead employers would each pay me, say, half of what they’re losing now we would both win. What am I going to do with all that moola?