How Evil Am I?

[swestrup]

I've been seriously contemplating the use of web bugs in the essays that I've been posting, so that I would have a mechanism for determining if they are getting read or not. On the other hand, many folks I know think that these things are evil incarnate. So, should I use them or not? They seem fairly harmless in this context, but I still wonder about it. What do folks think?

Comments

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

The obvious solution is to move to a Movable Type or Blogger or something set up on your own server, so you can just collect stats from your access log.

[peaceful-dragon.livejournal.com]

Eh, I don't think it's evil at all. What's wrong about wanting to know how many times your page has been hit? Or you can use a regular ol' counter. (Unless I'm missing something about web bugs, I didn't read the entire wikipedia page.)

[(Anonymous)]

I've been reading them. It wouldn't bother me if you inserted
web bugs.

Today I used Google to search all of your old Usenet postings,
browsed over all of their titles and read a few. Pretty cool!
-Jim
http://www.geocities.com/jameswi.geo
Thu, 25 Aug 2005 17:01:00 EDT (-0400)

[jbdeboer.livejournal.com]

It all depends on how you use them.

In this case, it is only as evil as the old web counters; that is, not very.

I think the real evilness of web bugs come when you start putting them in HTML emails.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Half the evil of a web bug comes in its subterfuge. Put a logo image visible in each post, you get the same results with less sneaky.

[swestrup]

I seriously considered that, but I don't have a logo to use, and I'm not sure I would want to try to figure out how to present one nicely anyway...

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Think of it as a signature.