Well, that's one less stat to obsess over which is a good thing.

Our intent was never to blog for income – not in the least. Blogging is a means for my wife & me to share our interests & happenings with our friends & family who're scattered all across the nation. Working on web development has also been an incredible learning opportunity. And then finally, I simply enjoy that this offers me expressive and creative outlets. Who knew I liked to write? And blogging may have improved my written communication skills a bit too…

That said, I do still go over my Google Analytics & Webalyzer (provided by my site host) stats just to cull out interesting trends and for curiousity's sake. Once a week or so, I enjoy pouring through the wealth of trivia that GA scrapes in.

Like you, the single biggest improvement I'm eager to make is to increase the number of comments on my blog. But I dunno if the dearth of comments is is a by-product of less-than-stellar topics, crummy writing, ho-huh site design, or if the people who visit our site really do read – and maybe even enjoy – the stuff that's there, but simply don't have anything to add. The thing is, I can check stats all day to see if anyone is showing up – and traffic is steadily, slowly climbing – but that doesn't give me a feel for how much the readers are connecting with my content once they get there. Comments are an immediate validation that something you said actually resonated with someone else. Vanity, thy name be “Rob,” I suppose.

I'll cite Kara Swisher's “Boomtown” as an example. Most of her posts, even ones that are prose instead of videos generate few, if any comments. It's not a function at all of the quality of her prose, and doesn't really indicate anything about how much they were read either. But then she posts “Twitter, Where Nobody Knows your name” and she gets 25 comments. And way more conversation was had than just in those comments. It just was scattered throughout the blogs, Friendfeed, Twitter itself, etc. Which I'm sure was just fine w/Kara.

I'm sure many have shared your trajectory from “stats obsession” to “eh, who needs it!” That said, Corvida is right, there are some valuable gems in GA.

I think it's a bit egotistical to try to keep up with your stats 24/7. I just my RSS subs during the weekdays, but I could care less about my traffic. I'm more concerned with my comment stats at the end of the day. You're good though. I'm not sure I'd cut off Google Analytics. I don't use it for stats as it pertains to numbers, but there are other valuable gems in GA.