Most people that have known me for awhile will probably agree I display a certain dry wit and am a natural smart alec. My wry, sarcastic personality is generally directed toward myself or social, political, institutional or cultural situations, events and trends. When directed at someone else it's always meant in good humor and jest — if I don't value, respect or care about you, I wouldn't take the time to rib you.

Of course, sometimes that sentiment doesn't always translate and can be misinterpreted.

So a public apology to my colleagues at our sister paper, The Troy Record, in case my latest infraction was noticed yesterday.

In drafting up our daily news budget (the detailed outline of what news stories and photos are running in the next day's print edition and on what pages they will appear), I'll often inject what I think is a little humor into the process with a glib description of the story, a line or two in the the "notes" for each story that is meant to elicit a chuckle, etc.

What I sometimes forget is that my co-workers at The Record have access to our editorial system, in which we draft up our budgets. So when I take a jab at them on the budget (we sometimes share stories of mutual interest/relevance to our readership -- for example, the trial of Joe Bruno), they can see it. Gentle chiding or comments that would be made with a nudge, nudge, wink wink, "you-know-I'm-only-foolin'" mentality don't always translate to print.

Bottom line, sometimes I make myself look like an ass.

So, for the record (and for The Record): My colleagues in Troy are a hard working, dedicated group of people. We all face the same challenges in putting out a daily newspaper, several weeklies and, of course, maintaining a Web site. We're joined by our victories as individual publications and as sister publications, and bonded by the same sweat, tears and frustrations put into those victories. My respect for what they do is through the roof and I would never disparage that.

One thing I like to do is keep track of our site analytics: page views, unique vistors and such. I especially like to track the numbers of our staff blogs.

August and September 2009 saw traffic decreases across nearly the entire board, a fact that greatly alarmed some here in the newsroom (scroll to the comments underneath the linked-to-post to discover one's idea of how to rectify the matter). Did the numbers rebound in October? Let's visit the tallies.

As always, the number is monthly unique visitors to the blog, with the percentage change compared to the previous month given in parentheses.

October 2009
1) Andrew Bernstein's Saratoga City Desk: 9,060 (an 80.6 percent increase)
2) Mareesa Nicosia's In the Biz: 2,770 (a 28.7 percent increase)
3) Stan Hudy's Diary of a Mad Sportswriter: 2,575 (a 56.6 percent increase)
4) Barb Lombardo's Fresh Ink: 545 (a 7.3 percent decrease)
5) TiW: 485 (a 6.6 percent increase)
5) Saratogian Sports' Extra Points: 244 (an 11.4 percent increase)

An almost all-encompassing rebound. The City Desk's spike in numbers can probably be attributed to approaching elections and a cyber jihad launched against reporter Andrew J. Bernstein and the anonymous (so he/she/they would claim) consortium of bloggers at one of the Spa City's newest, more (most?) reprehensible blogs.

In the larger scheme of things: Could the upswing in The Saratogian staff blogs serve as early indicators to a broad economic recovery across the nation? Our business analysts are currently reading the tea leaves on that one. Stay tuned.

Some impressive numbers last night over at the Saratoga City Desk as we live-blogged election results. We'll crunch the digits shortly.

First, a big thank you to everyone who checked the blog out. We do it for you, of course, so hopefully you found it both informative and entertaining. I mean, there's no reason reporting/reading about one of the fundamental cogs of our society can't be enjoyable.

Second, a big round of applause for our crack reporting staff on the ground at the Democratic and Republican camps, phoning in observations, quotes and numbers. (Wisely, we opted to give our reporting staff on crack the night off.) My phones (office and cell) were ringing constantly, and when not ringing, chiming with updates sent via text message. At times I would literally have my cell go off just as the office phone nestled back into the cradle.

A little hectic, but it was a blast.

On to the numbers.

The Saratoga City Desk blog had a total of 3,027 unique visitors on Tuesday: 1,004 between 9 and 10 p.m. and 976 between 10 and 11 p.m. The number dropped to 376 during the day's last hour, but that's no surprise. Staff was busy finishing/editing stories and getting them on the page for the print edition, and the live blog was declared over.

The larger column for Nov. 4 is just a projection
of traffic based on previous data.

As of the 3 o'clock hour this afternoon, the blog has seen over 500 unique visitors.

Granted, the visits for the live blog were less than we saw for the one we did for the March 30th special election between Jim Tedisco and Scott Murphy, but that race covered a much larger constituency.

Overall, www.saratogian.com had 21,831 unique visitors on Election Day; as of this writing (3:30 p.m. on Nov. 4, 2009) 8,323 unique visits have stopped by today (1,954 in the hour between midnight and 1 a.m.), which is already about 1,800 more visitors than we had on all of Nov. 2.

Update: 6:51 p.m.

Actually, seems the numbers I was quoting for Saratogian.com above were pulled from the monthly report for unique visitors. The daily report puts the numbers as follows: 8,109 on Nov. 2 (Monday); 24,824 on Nov. 3 (Tuesday); and as of this update, 14,616 on Nov. 4.

The difference is explained this way: The daily numbers are the "number of unique people that are visiting your site each day. This allows you to authoritatively say how many unique people were on your site each day of the month. The total unique visitors for the month however, shows the number of people visiting your site each month. This means that if a visitor's stay spans several days or even if a visitor leaves your site and then comes back later the same month, she will only be counted once in the total for the month.

So again, thanks for tuning in!

This reminds me: For all of my regular tens of readers, I'll have my "By the Numbers" feature, where I break down monthly traffic to The Saratogian staff blogs, ready to go sometime this week (which probably means you should look for it sometime NEXT week. Am I right, or am I right?)

I. Will. NEVER. Do. This. Again.

Well, I shouldn't say that. I guess it really depends on how useful readers found it.

I knew cutting an hour-long interview into short snippets would take some time, as I've done it before. However, I failed to factor in how God-awfully time consuming editing EIGHT hour-long interviews would be.

Perhaps it would have been more wise to slap entire interviews online. In fact, my boss even encouraged me to do so. However, at that point I had already posted interviews of the Department of Public Works and Finance candidates, and was nearly done with the set of videos for the second Department of Public Safety candidate; that left only the mayoral candidates, and I didn't want to break from the format.

More importantly, I felt it was of greater benefit to the reader to present short videos (most average between two to three minutes) on clearly specified topics than a 55-60 minute video that only three REALLY conscientious voters would have watched in their entirety.

So hopefully folks found the videos of some use, a chance to hear candidates speak on topics during a more relaxed, on-the-record but casual conversation.

I found most all of the candidates to be well-spoken and to present their cases clearly. In particular I found the conversations with the Finance and Mayoral candidates very informative, and I really struggled to condense their interviews into watchable video clips while still doing them justice. I hope I achieved a level of success, but unfortunately it's safe to say that a lot of their cogent points remain on the cutting room floor.

I'm sure there are nuts out there that will analyaze why X candidate got A number of videos while his opponent got B number of videos, or why Z candidate was primarly on the left side of the frame while Y candidate was on the other.

I was on board with some of the endorsements The Saratogian handed out, unconvinced on others. That's the way it goes, though. There's an argument out there that newspapers shouldn't endorse candidates, and that's a valid discussion to have; however, when a newspaper does so, it's important to understand that it's because candidates have been sized up and weighed evenly by a jury of individuals comprising an editorial board; each offers their input and (sometimes) debate on the final decision.

Endorsements go on the Opinion page for a reason. In that sense, it's no different than an editorial, and you don't hear too many arguments against newspapers publishing editorials.

If for whatever reason you're reading this on Election Day and need some last minute info to help make up your mind before you head to the ballot, head over to www.saratogian.com/elections for videos, endorsements, news coverage, candidate capsules, etc.

Times Union blogger extraordinaire Kristi Gustafson has started an interesting discussion on her blog: What happens to your Facebook page when you die? Hop on over there to read and comment.

I believe most of the social networking sites leave these profile pages up indefinitely, but Facebook has taken the next step and requires that next-of-kin fill out a form to keep the page up as a memorial, but with no log-in access.

Creepy? I don't think so, especially when you think about the fact that the tiniest details of our lives have all been parsed into tidbits of data streamlined for electronic transmission.

It's just the next step in our evolution to homo sapiens sapiens digitalus.

Speaking of evolution: I realize sites like Facebook are incredibly prevelant in the lives of most people these days. If you put in perspective though, they're only a few years old and ultimately destined to be supplanted by "the next thing," whatever that is. So perhaps these social networking sites (and the personal profiles, photos, information, blogs, etc. they host) will eventually go the way of GeoCities, which was effectively deleted from the Web this week (except for what some digital archivists/historians were able to salvage). Click here to read more.

I knew there was a reason I added a "zombie" tag to this blog.

Back in May I posted about a book I was reading called "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War." Click here to read that post.

Turns out the author will be speaking tonight at Sage College in Albany. Sweet! I'll be there. Click over to All Over Albany for the details.

I didn't realize Max Brooks was the son of Mel Brooks; which makes me wonder why Mel never tackled the walking undead in one of his films. A glaring omission in the work of the man that gave us "Dracula: Dead and Loving It."

Sadly, World War Z is the only book listed in my post from May that I've actually finished (though I did start "Children of Dune" before my wife left it on the shuttle train at the San Francisco Airport during our honeymoon. Ah well.)

The first two sets of the aforementioned candidate videos are now available for your apoplectic viewing. Up first: the candidates for commissioner of Public Works.

Click here to view the videos from Anthony "Skip" Scirocco's time in The Saratogian's hot seat.

Click here for Ed Miller's grilling.

And here's a direct link to "the hub," where links to all the other videos will be posted.

More videos coming. Check back all week.