The blog system that hosts this site … allows the author to sign up to see his/her statistics.

How many hits, going to which items, referred from where. Stuff like that.

Some bloggers are fascinated by (or even fixated upon) these numbers. I hardly notice. Actually, I don’t bother looking, but my wife loves to try to parse out why “hits” are up or down and talks about it, oh, three times a day.

Anyway, about the only Sure Thing I have noticed is … people don’t look at my blog (any blog?) on the weekends.

Why should that be?

My guess is … that most of us do our recreational web surfing during business hours, on business days. That is (shhhh!!) on our employer’s dime/time.

Today, Saturday, I could put up an item linking to a youtube video of me setting myself on fire … and it would get maybe half the looks it would receive on a normal weekday. When, clearly, more people are poking around the blogosphere … and when other bloggers might link me. (A lot of them take weekends off.)

If I’m going up in a spectacular column of fire … well, I still wouldn’t get linked till Monday, but the hits would jump enormously. Taking me maybe 10 times above the usual number I get on a weekend.

It’s interesting, this weekday/work hours skewing of the blog. If we guess my stats represent normal behavior … how much work time is lost every day (every week, every year) to people reading laobserved or oberjuerge.com — at the office?

Could be substantial. Might be a drag on our GDP. Maybe the presidential candidates should be talking about this.

Meanwhile, nobody will see this till Monday. That’s OK. I liked writing that M.C. Escher-ish headline. Doesn’t make sense … but it does.