Cross-posted on e.politics

Continuing with the recent exciting news from the Republican side of our little presidential campaign, Bruce Reed notes in Slate that Rudy Giuliani's official blog seems to be acting in sympathy with Hollywood writers — except that instead of the writers striking, it's the readers.

Rudy's staff has added a "how many views has this piece received" feature to the blog, and my advice to them would be to start clicking on the articles like crazy, 'cause it sure doesn't look as though anyone else is. Reed's happy to point out that the November 1st "Hizzoner's Highlights" seems to have been read 37 times, though several posts have reader counts in the hundreds.

Actually, a little experimentation shows that the "views" number reflects how many times the LINK that each article title points to has been clicked on, which is a totally different number than how many times the article itself has been read. In fact, all the blog posts seem to sit on the page in their entirety, and so an accurate reader count per article would be impossible unless you're tracking actual eyeball motions.

What a strange way to run a blog all around — normally, an article title links to a standalone version of the post, not to some outside piece. The way the Guiliani site is set up, I don't see how you can link to a particular article, leave a comment or trackback, or do just about anything else you expect to be able to do on a normal blog. It's as though they decided to create a blog-like piece of communications technology without the actual blog features. The only piece of reader interaction? That click-counter, whose sole effect is to make it look as though the site is essentially unread. Nice, um, job.

– cpd