As a freelance writer, I did the same thing. I kept a thick book listing what I sent out, when, and whether I made a sale. When this happened I circled the entry with a red pencil, and wrote "Ha!" in the margin.

And I loved poring over this data. Somehow it draws out the experience of waiting. It's sort of like spending your life crouched behind a divan at a surprise party. You always have this wild hope about the lines you haven't crossed out yet.

OK. When I started my home page on the Internet three years ago, I was the same person, and I was frustrated that in this info-driven medium, I had no idea who was visiting me. I knew there were not many -- about 35 a day -- from a tiny counter I placed at the bottom of the first page. But who were they, and why were they visiting? No clue.

Until this week. A friend, WLTE deejay Steve Sundberg, was telling me how he was using call logs data to bring more people to his Asian recipe site, The Straits Cafe Virtual Restaurant, at http://www.straitscafe.com. He put me in touch with two companies. One, Bellacoola Software, supplies me with data from my own logs. Every time someone visits my site, they record who, when, and where. Eventually they are going to charge for this service, but while they test the beta version, it's free. (Hint: get it now.)

I download this information every day or so -- OK, every couple of hours -- from Bellacoola's site at http://www.bellacoola.com.

I then feed it into a log analysis program. There are several you can download. Windows 95/NT programs include Marketwave HitList (downloadable from http://www.marketwave.com) and WebTrends (http://www.webtrends.com). Mac users swear by Analog (http://summary.net/soft/analog.html). Of these, I liked WebTrends best.

WebTrends breaks down your log data into twenty different categories, and shows them to you both as labeled bar charts and as lists. The analysis will likely strike you as more thorough than you require. But it's all interesting. For openers it tells you how many people visited your site -- the entire site, not just the front page. It tells you what page they came to first, what page they proceeded to, how long they stayed, what domain they connected from, what files they downloaded, even what browser they used.

It tells you how many calls were international. I found that 27% of my calls have been from places like Australia, the Netherlands, Malaysia, and Greece. It tells you whether the connecting sites are businesses, government offices, military installations, or the mysterious "other."

Remarkably, it tells you what keyword your visitors use to find your site. I was amazed -- and chagrined -- to learn that the number one reason people visit my site is an article I wrote about Alvin Toffler five years ago.

So far you are probably thinking, "How interesting -- and how sad." But information like the bit about Alvin Toffler should be like gold. I have always thought, or hoped, that people would visit my site because they found my writing entertaining. But logs don't lie -- there is zero evidence in my call data. What are people interested in? What they have always been interested in. In my case, celebrities. As a reporter, I have interviewed or reported on many fascinating people, from Toffler to Peter Drucker to Nicholas Negroponte to Bill Gates. If people want to read about those guys, I've got the goods.

This brainstorm -- "Give people what they already know they like, and maybe they will discover they also like you" -- is so basic, it should be watermarked on all business plan letterhead. But unless you have the actual data staring up at you, you may not come up with it.

It has helped me change my web site. I now feature a panel on the front page hotlinking all these famous dudes to inside pages. Result: traffic is inching up, from that constant 35 hits a day to (after four days) 125 hits a day. Way to go, Alvin.

Needless to say, if you are a businessperson trying to earn a living from your website, information about who your customers are, and what they like and linger over, and what they hasten to get away from, is money in the bank.

And if you're just an individual like me, who put up a homepage to meet people and show off a bit, now you can know who you're showing off to.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.