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Bstat Zero is a cooperative project
focussing on new media artists and groups; its purpose is to open up the normally hidden
interconnections among new media web sites and so give us some insight
into the cultural contexts which make up the world of new media.
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It is, first of all, a "log analyzer". Whenever you visit a web
site, a record of that visit is logged by the web server. Bstat Zero examines these
logs and shows the results in your web browser.
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| It started out in October 2004 as a small "command line" utility but grew into a set
of fully interrelated hypertext views of traffic in and out of web sites. While it
shows most of the standard statistics found in web log analyzers, its emphasis is not
statistics but on where the traffic comes from (countries, domains, IP addresses,
browsers, operating systems), and how it has been "referred" to the site (search
engines, search terms, other web sites).
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But its most significant feature and what makes it unique is its ability to do
"cross-site" comparisons. Bstat Zero comes in two versions,
one runs on the web sites of participating artists and groups and the other on BstatZero.org.
On a participating web site, you can view your own results, which are updated daily,
and then archived monthly so that you can check back in time.
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At the end of each month BstatZero.org downloads to its own server the
monthly archives from each participant. It's at BstatZero.org
that the cross-site facility comes into effect, making it possible to
investigate the underlying patterns of viewership and use among new
media web sites.
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In January 2005 Ivan Pope suggested that artists can circumvent the exclusivity of
the art market by using the Internet to create a networked culture that opens up
audiences to the "long tail of art".1 This idea interested me for its implication
that the Internet provides an intersection between the individual and a vast culture
of possibility, and fit in with an idea that I had been exploring on the CRUMB
mailing list, namely that what defines "net art" are not taxonomies or physical
structures but the imaginative relationship between the individual and the network.
It was an idea that helped to shape an earlier piece called
BigQuestions.com
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In it original design Bstat Zero required access to a shell account and some ability
to use the command line. But as I continued to work on the project, I felt it was a
significant shortcoming to exclude participants without shell access. This led to a
web-based installation and management system. Now, you can download an installer,
install Bstat Zero from your browser, and choose to have bstatzero.org manage your
your copy of Bstat Zero, i.e., once installed on a participaring web site, Bstat Zero
runs itself. This is done using a CGI interface. For those who prefer it, however, it
is still possible to install and manage Bstat Zero from a shell command line.
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| Bstat Zero has been tested on a site that serves 1.5 million
requests per month, and it begins to lose its efficiency as it approaches three-quarters of a
million, though still functional. This is an ongoing issue to be dealt with in later releases
and is a result of the fact that Bstat Zero is not merely collecting
statistics but creating searchable databases.
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1. http://blog.ivanpope.com/awol/the_long_tail_of_art/index.html".
See Chris Anderson
http://www.thelongtail.com,
who argues that the Internet creates a market for the "long tail" of the
marketplace, i.e. for products that conventional retailers find unprofitable.
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