Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

I have been fiddling with the access statistics for this blog. We use the "sitemeter", which doesn't deserve neither a link nor capitalization. One of the things I looked at is where do visitors come from. Indeed, several came through other blogs that links to postings here, but the forgetfulness of sitemeter drove me to other means.

I went to update myself on the state-of-the-art in blog search. I simply searched blogs for "stat.columbia.edu". The blog search engines that did find something are Bloglines (clean), Google Blog Search (efficient), Technorati (exhaustive) and Clusty Blogs (clustered).

Some of the postings were very interesting, and it's sad that they are not linked to the original posting, so that we (and others) could see it. The means for doing so is to use the Trackback mechanism. In particular, at the bottom of this page you will see the "TrackBack URL". It's a part of good manners in the blogosphere to include this URL when you're making a blog entry - most blog systems do allow it. Once you do that, your blog posting will look like a comment on the page.

Many people enter the blog through a search engine, so that's an additional incentive for your material to be linked to a blog post.