WEB POLLS AREN'T EXACT; THEY'RE FUN

Should Congress confirm the nomination of Sen. John Ashcroft for U.S. attorney general? That is one of the poll questions on the semissourian.com Web site this week. The other question asks which professional athlete you would most like to be for a round of competition. Tiger Woods? Kurt Warner? Mia Hamm? Venus Williams? Someone else?

Polls on semissourian.com are purely for entertainment value and are not in any way scientific. That being said, it's amazing to watch how the votes tally up, because some interesting trends have emerged. For example, with questions that have four or fewer potential answers, the result do not shift much after about 60 people have voted. This suggests that the poll is getting a pretty good sampling effect.

One user of the site sent me an e-mail asking if we could track how individual users voted. The answer is no. Our polling program doesn't allow tracking individual users, although it does prevent multiple votes in the same session. For example, if a person voted once, then went immediately back and voted again, the site would NOT accept that person's vote. A message would say: You Already Voted! But if this person logged off the Internet, then logged back on, he would be able to vote again. This is how most polling sites on the Web work, which is one reason why they can not be considered scientific.

So far, the highest number of votes on any of the semissourian.com polls has been 644. This question, asked during the height of the Florida vote brouhaha, sought opinions on which candidate had the moral high ground in the election controversy. Sixty-three percent said "Bush," 20 percent said "neither," 13 percent said "Gore," and 1 percent said "both." To see the results of all the polls to date, go to semissourian.com and answer one of this week's poll questions. You can scroll down the results page to see the tallies from the previous weeks. But you better hurry, because in the next few weeks we'll begin cutting back on how far back we go.

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Traffic at semissourian.com continues to climb. Hits for December topped 1.5 million, while page views were up 297 percent from a year ago. Not surprisingly, Christmas weekend (and Christmas Day) were the lowest traffic days in the past three months. Nevertheless, traffic as a whole was up compared to November, a remarkable statistic given the holidays and the end of the hourly election news updates.

Another new figure is the number of unique users who log onto semissourian.com. In December, more than 18,000 different computers logged onto the site. How this number translates into actual people is unclear since we are only able to count the different computers that access the site. Counting individuals would be impossible without some form of registration. Thus, the same person who visits semissourian.com from a home computer and an office computer would be counted as two users. Meanwhile, if five people accessed semissourian.com from the same computer, they would only be counted once.

Tracking traffic is one of the powerful aspects about the Internet. Few other media have the ability to measure results and provide direct feedback. For example, we can track exactly how many times a particular Web ad appears on our site or how many times a particular area of the site is accessed. We know the search terms that people use on Yahoo!, for example, to get to semissourian.com. And we know where that person exits the site. You can't do any of that with television or radio. With them, you have to rely on sampling. With the Internet, you can be precise. It's this type of information which is going to revolutionize advertising, among other things, in the future.

For December, the most visited areas of semissourian.com were:

1. Home page

2. Today's news

3. Sports front

4. Obituaries

5. Classifieds front

6. High school sports

7. Search

8. Daily record

9. Local news

10. Site index

11. Opinion front

12. Weather front

13. Births

14. Sports forum

15. College sports

One of the challenges we face at semissourian.com is encouraging users to delve deeper into our site. Not all our users realize that there is fresh content throughout most areas of the site each day. For example, our "Today's news" area highlights 15 to 30 local and regional news stories each day. But there are more than 80 other fresh stories that appear elsewhere on the site in specialized areas. For example: in "Arts and entertainment" or "Daily record."

One popularly visited area of our site, as indicated in the list above, is where we list recent births. To get there, a user must first go to the "Daily record" area of the site and then select "Births." Here the user will find a description of the parents, as well as the weight and size of the newborn.

Another site for newborns in this area, which goes beyond semissourian.com, is the "b@bies online" area of Southeast Missouri Hospital. Here, you can find a photograph of the newborn.

To be honest, I've never really paid that much attention to how very tiny babies looked. But I found it quite interesting to surf this area of the hospital's site just to look at the different yawns and smiles. Am I the type of person likely to visit this particular site on a regular basis? No. But if friends of mine have a picture of their newborn there, I will. To visit the area yourself, log onto southeastmissourihospital.com and follow the directions. While doing so, you'll notice many other exciting community and medical features there.

Meanwhile, to cast your vote on whether John Ashcroft should be confirmed as attorney general, be sure to sign onto semissourian.com.

Jon K. Rust is director of the semissourian.com MediaLab and vice president of Rust Communications.