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#1 2009-10-03 09:54:23
Morning folks, Cas here. After another attempt at a mature conversation with Mr. Slager was rebuffed with baseless accusations, mistruths, and a disingenuous "offer" I've officially come over to the side of ignoring The Wareham Observer. This was made much easier by the fact that I've recently become aware that his website statistics are available for all to read at http://www.thewarehamobserver.com/usage. I looked at these numbers recently, and I came to a conclusion that was startling to me, but probably not for most other people here - nobody cares what he has to say about Wareham politics. There is a core group of about 65 people who account for over half of the hits on the site every month, and his site received more than 15% FEWER pageviews in September than it did in August. All of his visitor increase that he boasted of the other day on the Courier’s site can be statistically shown to be because of his coverage of the Scott Monteiro tragedy (please read the details below for the factual details behind these claims). Five dozen people out of a town of 20,000 is not anything to get worked up about, especially when a bunch of those are probably people on this site, Slager himself, the BOS, etc. My guess is there are about 40 individual citizens unconnected to his site, this site, or the board who read his site with any regularity.
I encourage anybody who's interested to view the link above - it is publicly available without any computer trickery and anybody on the Internet anywhere in the world can view the information (and I have copies just in case he tries to lie his way out of it, like he did when he posted individuals' email addresses a while back). The reports are generated by a software package called Webalizer, which analyzes the logs created by the web server and makes pretty pictures and lists out of the information. When Slager said in the past that his logs are provided by Bondware, and he doesn’t track them himself….well, these are the logs that Bondware provides (reference: http://support.bondware.com/index.php?_ … icleid=125). The link above will take you to monthly summaries, and you can drill down further into the information by clicking on the month names. There’s a lot of data available on the site above, and there’s a rather lengthy analysis below, both of which support the claims above. Feel free to read on, but I won’t be upset if you get bored by the math - you can skip straight to the end for the conclusions. First, though, a couple of quick definitions:
-A "visit" according to Webalizer is anybody who loads a page who has not loaded a page in the previous 30 minutes. This means that one person who goes to the page every hour around the clock would count for 24 "visits", but if the same person views 10 different pages in quick succession, that's only one "visit" (For reference, one individual on a Verizon FIOS connection clocked 292 visits in September - that's almost 10 visits per day, all month long)
-A "site" according to the report is one IP address of a visitor. This is how Webalizer denotes individual visitors. In my analysis, I’ll use “visitor” to describe this data point, as it seems clearer to the reader.
-A "pageview" (often just titled "pages" in column headers) is somebody who loaded one html page - the main page on the site, the news page, etc.
-A "hit" is a request for anything on the site - this could be pages, images, layout information, JavaScript, etc.
So to put it all together - a visitor is one person who can visit the page at different times throughout the day. In each visit, he/she can view one or more pages, which can cause additional hits by loading images and such. There should be a fairly consistent relationship between pageviews and hits (and Slager’s stats follow this relationship, meaning that we would expect to see the same trends in pageview and hit calculations), but the relationship between visits and pageviews can vary widely.
The most telling statistic available in these reports is the concentration of his readership. In the month of September, a quarter of his hits came from only THIRTEEN individuals. This isn’t an aberration – in August it was eleven individuals making up 25% of the hits. It only took sixty-eight people to make up half of his total hits in the last month. Note that I’m using hits for this analysis because his reports do not list the top visitors by pageviews – only by hits, or kilobytes transferred. However, as stated above, hits and pageviews go hand in hand, so the same numbers would be pretty darn close if we were able to calculate pageviews. So let’s repeat this - the majority of his pageviews came from 68 individuals in September - for August, it was only 64. Essentially, five dozen people in a town of 20,000 account for half of his readership. In the grand scheme of things, 64 people out of 20,000 is basically a rounding error. To look at it even further, there are three individuals out there who, combined, accounted for 1 out of every 10 hits on Slager’s site in September. Oh, and in August? The top three were responsible for 1 out of every 8 hits.
Mr. Slager's claims of his visitor growth on the Courier's site recently are accurate, as represented by the numbers on the page linked above. However, I now know the reason he wouldn't answer my repeated questions about pageviews. It had nothing to do with my being anonymous – the truth is that his daily pageviews were DOWN OVER FIFTEEN PERCENT from August to September, and making that information public would fly in the face of his claims of setting traffic records in September. His August average was 2,160 and September was 1,822. While this can't be confirmed without access to the raw logs, this increase in visits and decrease in pageviews suggests that people come to the site, and then don't care about anything once they were there.
Now, if you look at the September statistics, one thing in particular jumps out pretty quickly in the daily average visitors - the time from 9/7-9/12 has a statistically significant deviation from the rest of the month. In fact, it’s 96% likely that his increase in viewership from August to September can be attributed to this tragedy coverage. Read on for the sweet, sweet (ok, boring and nerdy) math…. Five of the six highest daily visitor totals from the month come during the 9/7-9/12 window. If we look back at what was on his site at that time, we see this is when he had the articles posted about the Scott Monteiro tragedy. You can see by looking at the Top 100 Search Strings section of the report that quite a few people found Mr. Slager's site while searching for information about the tragedy. Now, if we compute the average visitors per day excluding this bump driven by the specific non-political content, the total is not 626 per day, it's 588.75 per day. This is a DECREASE from the prior month's visits, in addition to his already-described pageview decrease. For reference, in the time window that the Monteiro story was available, there was an average of over 775 visits per day. If I can put my math-nerd hat on for a moment, this average is 1.79 standard devations over the mean value. Looking at a stddev chart, we can see that there’s about an 4% chance that a value 1.79 devations above the mean occurs by chance. What does that mean in English? It means it’s about 96% likely that the bump in traffic during this time was not just random, and instead was due to the different content available at that time.
Now let’s take a look at some of September’s other pageview numbers, and see if there are any blips there. Looking at the same data sorted by day, it's easy to see spikes on the 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th. The easiest way to see this is to look at the green lines that spike higher than all of the others in the first graph in the September reports. Unsurprisingly, these are the days that the "Sunday chats" are held. Over 27% of all of his pageviews for the month come on these 4 days, obviously driven by the continuous reloading of pages by the same people, over and over either to see what’s new, or to make comments themselves. It's worth noting that only 11.6% of his visits came on these days that produced 27% of the pageviews. Additionally, it’s interesting to analyze the pages per visit on different days. Overall, the average was almost exactly 3 pages per visit for the month of September. This means that the average user comes to the site, views the main page, clicks on two other things, and leaves. These two other things could be a user logging in (one page to load the login box, one page to actually log in), voting in a poll, making one (and only one) comment, etc… This average, however, is misleading – on the days that he had chats, average pageviews per visit were 10.1, 6.5, 6.5, and 6.4. There was exactly one other day in the entire month that had more than 3 pageviews per visit. Again, this shows that there is a small subset of people who spend an awful lot of time on the site, and then everybody else doesn’t really care what he has to say.
Looking at the other fields available in the report….it seems that just about nobody links to Slager’s site. This can be confirmed by looking at the Top 100 Referrers section of the report. When someone clicks on a link to go to a website, the site they go to can tell where the link was that the user clicked. So, for example, when boston.com linked to this site, BillW could tell how many users came here by clicking on that link. The vast majority of the referrers on Slager’s site are…..wait for it….other pages on Slager’s site. Then there are a few search engines and webmail sites (like Yahoo Mail), but no independent pages that link to it. Put another way, there’s nobody on the Internet who views Slager as a trustworthy enough source to warrant linking to anything that he writes.
Finally, looking at September's search terms is interesting. There are the expected things like "Wareham Observer" and "Robert Slager". Then there are things about current events like the Scott Monteiro references. However, there was also "federal indictment of robert slager" and "da investigation into robert slager". I don't have any commentary about it, but I wonder if someone out there knows something I don't.
So what have we learned, then? Quite simply, Slager’s audience is much, much smaller than I thought it was, and is trending downwards. He has a core group of a few seemingly dedicated readers, but appears to have little to no influence outside of that group. These dedicated readers slant Slager’s overall numbers upwards significantly, as evidenced by both how few of them account for a large portion of the pageviews, as well as the clear difference between traffic patterns on “normal” days as compared to days where he hosts a chat. In one sentence, it summed up thusly: Robert Slager is statistically irrelevant in the town of Wareham. It’s that simple. People here have been saying that for months, but now we have the math to prove it conclusively. Because of this, I will no longer be responding to anything that he writes on his website – the only people that read the site seem to be the ones who have already bought into his political philosophy, and all the facts in the world won’t convince them. If he does continue to post in other forums, such as the Courier website, then I will respond to him as appropriate, but I now realize that engaging him about the stuff he writes on his website is, mathematically, a waste of my time. The only caveat I’ll make to that is if he starts writing lies about this analysis – if they’re really, really egregious (as opposed to just his normal level of lie), then I will address them here.
Thanks for reading,
-Cas
Edit: Fixed spelling errors
Last edited by acasualobserver (2009-10-03 09:57:19)
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#2 2009-10-03 10:00:58
Cas is the man!!
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#3 2009-10-03 10:22:56
Thanks Cas. I have often said that in a way, we are helping to keep the rag alive. He is statistically insignificant as you have clearly proven.
In order to keep focused on what is important in town, we need to ignore the rag and work towards a Wareham we can be proud of.
I ask my fellow bloggers to focus on town meeting right now. We can deal with April after Oct.
20,000 people in this town and slager and the bos are so obsessed with this site that slager doesn't print much in the way of news and the bos are in tears.
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#4 2009-10-03 10:32:34
molly great point.. oct 26 foucus.... i have copies of the following if anyone would like them emailed let me know...
1.. westfield deed.(print it out hand it around)
2.. MGL's pertaining to the westfield restrictions(1977 bos seems were in thier legal rights)
3.. town meeting warrant..(u can read & prepare ?'s for oct 26
4.. the police union statement(facts about civil service)
if you have these items you can be a better read and truly informed on the facts so you may make YOUR on decision on which way to vote for the future of our town for generations to come...
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#5 2009-10-03 11:27:47
I guess it's a good thing he actually publishes a newspaper and doesn't just rely on blog stats alone...why don't you impress us with your publication's circulation stats now... Oh yes, that's right, you can't... you don't have one...
I do commend you on your decision to finally go over to the side of "ignoring The Wareham Observer" though. It seems as though every time the focus is removed from the relevant issues at hand to Robert and who is reading, buying or selling The Wareham Observer, unnecessary "collateral damage" always seems to be the result...you know, like innocent business owners getting harassed and threatened because he sold the Observer and then again when he didn't sell the Observer...yes, that whole boycott idea was an absolute stunning success, wasn't it? I guess if the point was to torment local business owners it was. Now we have a group of seniors, some of which just might have enjoyed getting a local publication free of charge to read with their meals taken away from them...no one was forcing them to read it...they could have used it for puppy trainer paper if they chose but at least they had a choice...THEIR choice...now that choice of reading it or throwing it away has been taken away from them...Are some of you so fearful by the publication of a local "rag" that you feel as though you should be allowed to control who and who should not read it? Please do everyone a favor and simply ignore it before any more damage is done to innocent bystanders that are guilty of doing nothing more than getting thrown in the middle of the rival gang war of the Observers...
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#6 2009-10-03 12:05:58
Ms Lilly: I'm curious: Have you read Larry McDonald's piece in today's Standard Times? "
( It's also available here on the thread that starts : "ST". )
My question: After reading it do you still insist on the Slager version?
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#7 2009-10-03 12:11:52
Ms Lilly,
You make me sick. It's clear you have every intention to distract and paint a picture that is clearly politically motivated. I would sit here and show you how wrong you are, but like your good friend Robert Slager, you are more interested in your personal and political agenda.
I'm off to enjoy my day. I finally hit the ignore button on Miss Lilly.
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#8 2009-10-03 12:16:06
MsLilly wrote:
I guess it's a good thing he actually publishes a newspaper and doesn't just rely on blog stats alone...why don't you impress us with your publication's circulation stats now... Oh yes, that's right, you can't... you don't have one...
I do commend you on your decision to finally go over to the side of "ignoring The Wareham Observer" though. It seems as though every time the focus is removed from the relevant issues at hand to Robert and who is reading, buying or selling The Wareham Observer, unnecessary "collateral damage" always seems to be the result...you know, like innocent business owners getting harassed and threatened because he sold the Observer and then again when he didn't sell the Observer...yes, that whole boycott idea was an absolute stunning success, wasn't it? I guess if the point was to torment local business owners it was. Now we have a group of seniors, some of which just might have enjoyed getting a local publication free of charge to read with their meals taken away from them...no one was forcing them to read it...they could have used it for puppy trainer paper if they chose but at least they had a choice...THEIR choice...now that choice of reading it or throwing it away has been taken away from them...Are some of you so fearful by the publication of a local "rag" that you feel as though you should be allowed to control who and who should not read it? Please do everyone a favor and simply ignore it before any more damage is done to innocent bystanders that are guilty of doing nothing more than getting thrown in the middle of the rival gang war of the Observers...
maybe the ONLY revelant ? was/is....was it legal or was ok with OCES policy and procedures?? nothing else matters political or other wise.. did ya ever stop to think his papers were NEVER allowed in the first place??? think about the whole picture and ciccumstances before you and your mentor cast stones and point fingers... for every finger you point there are 4 pointing back at you!!!!!
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#9 2009-10-03 12:38:17
First of all Mr. Wheeler, thank you for the very respectful manner in which you addressed your question to me...I guess it proves that we can all move forward towards the respectful and meaningful debate we have all been looking forward to regardless of our supposed "alliances"....
If I have learned anything from all of this, it is that the same facts can be compared by two different points of view to come up with truthful analysis...perhaps that is what is meant by perception...so what I have chosen to do is to weight my thoughts on the end results instead of the circumstances that lead to them...in this case, the end result was the loss of something that some of our seniors just might have enjoyed not by any choice of their own...that is a disservice to anyone, let alone homebound seniors...and that is sad...just sad, nothing more...
I have no other agenda, personal or political other than to try and get as many viewpoints as possible regarding the true issues at hand in an attempt to make an educated decision based on them...any one can read the facts, it is all in the interpretation and everyone should be allowed to have the choice of from where and what they choose to base their interpretations...
My only agenda is to focus on the issues, try and learn as much as I can about them from as many sources as possible and make a decision I feel was an educated one...
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#10 2009-10-03 13:21:27
CAS I EXPECT A BIG JEER COMING YOUR WAY! EXCELLENT JOB
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#11 2009-10-03 13:49:44
IHS, he responded to me already via email and on the Courier's site. I'm not sure if there's a jeer coming, but if there is I'm sure it'll be as misleading and full of lies as his email. As always, the only change is the email addresses
from Slager
to Me
date Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 10:45 AM
subject Response
mailed-by aol.com
hide details 10:45 AM (2 hours ago)
Here is the reason I will not engage with you:
You pick and choose the facts that support your premise and ignore the one that do not.
Your recent "analysis" of our web stats is a perfect example of that. You make a completely convoluted analysis and ignore the facts that shoot a hole in your premise. Let me give you an example. Your conclusion is that our web site has only 60 or so regular readers. As you pointed out, "sites" means individual users. You intentionally chose to focus on "visits" because to analysis site visits undermined your argument.
In September we had 2,952 total unique site visits. As you well know, that means 2,952 separate IP address. That number is quite a bit higher than 60. That is why you chose to ignore it. That is a perfect example of why I consider you disingenuous. Please feel free to contradict what I just wrote. We both know you won't because it blows a giant hole in your entire argument.
Also your claim that we dropped in the number of page views lacked the necessary context, as you are no doubt aware. There was one less day in September than August. Granted, this is not a huge statistical difference, but it was a factor. The bigger factor was my personal decision to include far more complete stories on the home page last month than in August. Because of that, visitors did not need to open a second page to read this content. That was a huge reason why the number of page views was down.
But as well you can see, the number of site views and visitors were up. We both know that is the true measure of the growth of a web site. Of course you chose to downplay that because it does not support your premise.
I might have considered your offer but these are the kind of tactics you constantly employee. Why would I believe it would be any different in another forum? If you were truly an honest person, you would post this response, unedited, beneath your analysis. But we both know you will not because you are more interested in attempting to discredit me than in telling the truth.
Robert Slager
He then sent me another email less than three hours later while I was out running errands and getting my wife a flu shot. This email had nothing in the body, and simply had a subject that said "No response? Why am I not surprised? Thanks for proving my point." I responded to this email as follows (note that I also posted this information on the Courier's site)
from Me
to Slager
date Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 1:38 PM
subject Re: No response? Why am I not surprised? Thanks for proving my point.
mailed-by gmail.com
hide details 1:38 PM (9 minutes ago)
It's unbelievable how ignorant you are being. You made some ridiculous assumptions, showed a lack of statistical knowledge, and absolutely lied about the analysis, all in about 3 paragraphs. That's impressive, even for you. Here's my response from the courier's site.
Mr. Slager, once again you lie. My reference to your 60 visitors was regarding the top visitors to your site. If you review your report of top visitors sorted by hits, the report breaks down what percentage of the overall hit count each visitor accounted for. Making a running tally of this shows that in the month of September, THREE individuals accounted for 10% of the hits, thirteen people accounted for 25%, and 68 people accounted for over 50%. Therefore, the statement "the majority of the traffic came from 68 people" is entirely factually correct. While there were 2,952 total visitors to his site in the month, 68 of them accounted for half of his traffic, and the other 2,884 accounted for the other half. All of this evidence shows that there is a small core group of supporters that drive his readership.
As for thereference to there being fewer days in September than there were in August, this is another disingenuous attempt on to spin your way out of the situation. Since you obviously read my analysis, you know that I used daily averages in all of the calculations. This was specifically designed to account for the fact that there were fewer days in September. Your total pageviews per day decreased by 15% from August to September. The fact is that the increase in sites from month to month is statistically a result of the Monteiro coverage, and not the political coverage, just like your increase in visits was. Removing the days that this coverage was available on your site from the calculation shows an overall decrease in readership by any measure - pageviews, hits, visits, or sites. The town is beginning to see that your hateful, divisive coverage of the issues is not worth paying attention to, and I'm joining with them.
Now, to continue to show the kind of person Mr. Slager is, he did indeed send me an email this morning about this topic. That email was sent at 10:45 AM. At this time, I was driving my pregnant wife to her doctor's office so that she could get her seasonal flu shot (she had an 11:00 appointment for which we left at 10:25). Afterwards, we stopped at Target to create a baby registry. This site shows Mr. Slager's post as being made 2 hours ago, so it was sometime around 11:30. So he sent me an email, and when I didn't respond in 45 minutes on a Saturday morning, he posted here that I had not yet responded, implying I was dodging the issue. He then sent me another email at 1:23 PM with no text in the body, but just a subject saying "No response? Why am I not surprised? Thanks for proving my point". Apparently his point was that my wife should get a flu shot, because that's all that was proved this morning. He did this same thing the other night. I apologize for the distractions to all of the readers here who are trying to move Wareham forward, but it is important to see the tactics and methods that Mr. Slager employs - I hope the few loyal readers that he does have start to read his content with the skeptical eye that it deserves.
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#12 2009-10-03 14:15:02
Stay off the Courier site!!
It is now a surrogate Slager newspaper that soon will not be available in print form. (My opinion).
He now has another outlet given by owners that also do not live in Wareham and are happy to keep a "pissin' contest" going on in order to increase their site and paper.
Use this site ONLY!
If Slager, a member of the BOS, their lackeys, whomever wants to respond, let them respond here. It increases the amount of people that will visit this site, thereby giving the curious the reason to stay and actually post because they will feel comfortable being with the "real" people, not a bunch of elitist snobs that believe their own bullshit.
Stick with what works.
THIS site works. That is why you are so powerful, and getting stronger every day.
Again...don't be distracted.
Concentrate.
Only a few days left until Town Meeting and these people will, as I have said a thousand times, do anything, say anything, spin anything and cause disruption to a group of people that they are absolutely petrified of...but won't admit it.
You are the ATOM BOMB.
You don't need to fight with people who have pea shooters. (That reference is for you, Dick.).
FOCUS!!!
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#13 2009-10-03 14:43:26
By the way, Cas...I am not criticising you or anyone else. I am only concerned that we are giving publicity and credence to people who don't deserve it.
I hope your baby is healthy and happy and prosperous and a delightful combination of both of you.
How did an old coot like you marry a young girl?
I know: any woman would appreciate you, just as we men do.
You are brilliant and a wealth of information that we could not have without you.
Please understand I only said what I did out of respect and concern of losing sight of the ultimate goal...TAKE BACK WAREHAM!
Merci, mon frere!
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#14 2009-10-03 19:07:11
On the paper version, I would like to know why the town is printing it's warrant in an opinion paper insted of the two real circulations that are available at almost every store in wareham along with home delivery.
They obviously dont want people to know whats coming up. Once again the lowest bidder is going to cost us more in the long run.
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#15 2009-10-03 19:09:01
as taxpayers are we able to know what the bids were..?
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#16 2009-10-03 20:06:57
Ms Lilly: I can be a bit "flakey" myself at times,but you have outdone me: You made an accusatory judgement based on a falsehood...I pointed you toward the facts, and you simply deflect those facts and chatter amicably about issues being more important than facts.
" Houston...We've got a problem here..."
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#17 2009-10-03 20:18:33
MsLilly wrote:
If I have learned anything from all of this, it is that the same facts can be compared by two different points of view to come up with truthful analysis...perhaps that is what is meant by perception...so what I have chosen to do is to weight my thoughts on the end results instead of the circumstances that lead to them...in this case, the end result was the loss of something that some of our seniors just might have enjoyed not by any choice of their own...that is a disservice to anyone, let alone homebound seniors...and that is sad...just sad, nothing more...
FACTS AND TRUTH ARE JUST THAT... NO PERCEPTION..NO QUESTIONS..YOU CAN HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT THEM BUT PLEASE SEPERATE FACTS & TRUTH FROM OPINION...
that is what many of us here are doing.. pshooter has put up the charter and many meetings to be viewed FACT.... so citizens may make their our informed decisions based on facts...
i get your point about the end result again if you back up maybe the papers were NEVER allowed in the first place so someone else deprived the MOW people in the end..
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#18 2009-10-03 20:31:22
Mr. Wheeler:
Ms. Lilly is off the wagon again, this is usually a tell tale sign that there is trouble in paradise. Coupled with the "secret" meeting this afternoon I would surmise (based solely on past behavior - which is always the best predictor of future behavior) that someone wasn't playing nice in the sandbox and got caught. Considering the fact that Mr. Bob Bliss is rumored to be returning to his employment by order of some state agency I would think that they are trying to figure out how they are going to clean up the little mess they left behind.
Cas:
Bobo is irrelevant period, it goes way beyond math.
To all of my fellow truth bloggers, as I mentioned a few days ago with the state's latest numbers things have gotten pretty ugly for every town, including the one I am employed by. I have decided to retire and join my husband in Florida for the winter. I will check in often and wish you all the best!
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#19 2009-10-03 20:55:15
Zoo,
I wish you all the best on your retirement. I will also say I'm jealous! Winter in Florida versus a winter in NE? Not a contest! Please keep in touch and I know I speak for others when I say THANK YOU!
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#20 2009-10-03 21:12:16
Zoo, best of luck!
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#21 2009-10-03 21:52:03
Bon soir, mon freres!
Two things from this thread...
1. Cas - the Harlot of Halifax pulled the same nonsense on me. He called in the AM when I was away from the phone with other doings. When I returned the call in the midafternoon, the first oppportunmity to do so, I got his answering machine. Of course, i was excoriated for not returning a call by HIS deadline. You see, we all are supposed to dance to his tune. yeah, right.
2. Dan the Man - you could not be more on target with your admonition to abandon the Courier website. I have tried to make clear, perhaps in too strident a manner, that the linkages between the Courier and "Rob" are there. Would the Boston Globe allow Howie Carr of the Herald to use the Globe's blogs to promote his vision of the world? Of course not. Then, why does the Courier allow someone who aspires to become a journalist, who hopes to be an actual competitor, who has sold his soul to the perversion of local governance that is the current BoS, to use their website as his soapbox?
Time spent on him is like trying to catch the squirrel in your bird feeder bare-handed. The slippery little rodent bastard will get away; and return, again & again, to plunder those sunflower seeds. Thus it is with the pathetic rodent in Halifax.
Focus. Take Back Wareham!!!! Focus.
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