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Nice post! I have been thinking much about this for my own written works...

My strange conclusion was to not capture analytics at all. My loose metric is now: which posts inspire people to email me directly?

I have decided I do not want to know what you read, how long you read it, where you came from... Only whether or not you felt something. And data will not tell me this.

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Interesting! I was reading all the comments, wondering if anyone would express the concept that maybe, just maybe, all of this might not be that useful after all.

More specifically, how often does all of this really need to be down to the individual person (or IP address) at all? Even if you know that piece of information at an ephemeral level, my own suspicion is that aggregate data should be sufficient for any non-creepy use case.

Perhaps one way to phrase the question, how would having personal-level details in the analytics change the actions you might perform based on available data?

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