*Note: Le me start off by saying this is not intended as a "suck-up" article.  I hope it doesn't appear that way, it is simply a comment on an observation I recently made and thought others who blog here may find interesting.

I am sure that we have all heard about how the auto-syndication of JoeUser is a benefit to us, the bloggers.  But I wonder if we really appreciate just how much that syndication throughout the community actually accomplishes.  I know I didn't until recently. 

During the recent downtime, my itch to blog got the better of my and I established a new blog over at Blogger.  It will mainly serve as a mirror to this blog, to be used if things go down here for whatever reason.  But, of course, I wasn't getting much of any traffic.  Such is the nature of us little, random bloggers out in the wide waves of cyberspace.  And so, I availed myself of some of the tools out there to generate traffic to your blog (primarily via BlogExplosion and BlogMad).

While surfing for credits, I noticed something interesting.  There was one blog that caught my eye.  The owner was bragging about how he gets around 600 views of his blog every month.  Now, I know there are other big time blogs that get huge multiples of that.  But 600 a month is pretty decent for a no-name blogger, don't you think?

Well, I, too, am a no-name blogger.  So, I started thinking about how much traffic I get here at JU.  It is a LOT more than that.  Let's consider this month so far.  First off, we have lost quite a few days this month due to JU being down, so the following figure will probably UNDER represent the whole story.

Going off of the "Selected" figure, which I understand means that someone actually clicked on the link to go to that article, I found the following.  I have had my articles physically selected by readers 1910 times so far this month.  Almost 2000 times someone has clicked on one of my articles.  Not just randomly surfed past my site while trying to get their credits.  This doesn't even take into account the number of articles of mine that have been seen on the front page (which have been a few this month already). 

All of this without having to avail myself of any services to bring more traffic here.  This is simply a fact of the community here and auto-syndication.

Bottom line: Thanks to the JU system, we are all getting read a LOT more than is normal for "average Joe" bloggers like most of us.  A LOT more.  I found that quite fascinating actually.