Saturday, December 17, 2005

Less Net

A few days ago, it was pointed out to me that I was among the top three Internet users in my department, which consists of thirty or so people spread across three buildings. I was not the top user, but I was up there.

It stands to reason, of course, that my use would be high because I am the webmaster, and even the surfing I do on our own site as a direct part of my work adds to my total.

Even so, I decided to see what I could do to lower my statistics. I canceled all my RSS feeds. I quit checking news sites in the morning when I arrived at work. I eliminated slashdot and macsurfer from my browsing, even though they pertain peripherally to my work, as well as news.com, and several other web development, Mac and software-related sites. And I cut all the general news sites such as cnn.com and msnbc.com.

I also quit doing tabbed browsing. The monitoring software turns on the meter for every site in a tab, whether I'm looking at it or not. No more leaving five tabs open all day while I work on something else.

It will be January before I know what impact all that has. I suspect that 70 per cent of my web hits are unavoidable visits to the site I work on, so my usage numbers will remain high.

But what I wanted to report now is that I don't miss all that surfing as much as I thought I would. I was afraid I would feel cut off from the outside world without access to all the web sites, but I don't.

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