Sitemeter fun, Institute for Social and Economic Research

Ever wonder what was in that SiteMeter button at the bottom of Blogs? Well, here's a glimpse of what is available in that arcane world of traffic control. This link should take you to my traffic meter for a look at a world map with dots representing people's location that visited my site. No specific details are available these days to contact any one visitor.

http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=sm6beauville&report=79&rnd=2005927&md=1&pg=1&visit=100

The Seattle area and Oregon provide about half the hits. Mostly the Seattle area. You can also see that there are many parts of Alaska not represented in my readership, at least not in the last 100 readers. The dots on Juneau and Seattle are really the top of a pile of dots, so to speak.

I suppose far-flung parts of Alaska don't get the word from the grapevine that this blog is here. They might not be as hip in running blog searches either. Another explanation for what looks like a lack of interest on the part of a lot of Alaska, in something designed for the progressive fisherman, is that his server might not be right where he lives.

There is also the theory that fishermen aren't computer users. But, that from a fisherman who is decidedly not progressive, BUT has an important fisheries political post. Go figure. A useful piece of research for Alaska's Institute for Social and Economic Research would be to find out "what women want", oops, I mean "what fishermen want." You hear from people that like to run fishermen's organizations, but you don't get any surveys from their membership. Like in, Rate from one to ten the importance you put on beating the next guy to a set. And Rate from one to ten your capabilities for staying on the cutting edge of global product development and demographic information.

You can count on one thing regarding what fishermen want, and what the industry needs, the folks in the trenches aren't going to listen to a bunch of think-tankers that haven't put in their time in the trenches themselves. The above hyper-linked article about ISER by Wes Loy is good. Notice that the punch line gets to the Regional Seafood Development Associations. Where was ISER when I was pushing the RSDA concept by myself 15 years ago. I'll tell you where, disagreeing with experience "from the trenches" as they still are.

We don't need more gum flapping, we need to unify behind some great initiatives that are in the works, especially the RSDAs. I hear the theory that the big processors might just let the RSDAs dabble around a bit and then pull the plug on them. I've been having a search engine give me e-mails on "Production Associations" and it has been overwhelming. Everybody in the world uses the production association concept except Alaska fishermen I think. Why is that ISER? What are fishermen really up against in Alaska? Can they take control, given their business acumen (at whatever level that is at) and the opposition to their taking control (at whatever level that is at)?

Those are questions ISER should be researching. The problem is that you won't get the truth by asking in the obvious places. It's like they say about breaking into Hollywood, if you haven't grown up in the business, you aren't going to know how to play the game.