The day is only partway done, and my blog has clocked over fifteen thousand unique visitors. Most of them, about eight thousand, came by between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. I assume this will be my one big spike for the month, but it means there's a chance I'll end December with over 40K visitors for the month. My usual daily average remains around 600 daily visitors.
In the past, a sudden rush like that meant that some nerd, probably somewhere in Europe, was searching for something and found it on my blog. This nerd, being part of a larger community that happened to be searching for the same thing, made known that he had found what he was searching for, and suddenly everyone else came rushing to my blog to see the thing he'd found. This flocking behavior would certainly explain why the sudden rush happened within such a short time.
Ultimately, I'm not attached to my blog stats, but I am constantly fascinated by these weird fluctuations. I don't know much, but I can tell you what they obviously mean: they mean that, when these paroxysms of activity happen, it's not because of my stellar blogging. If I were that stellar, I'd have high numbers all the time, so if anything, these bursts of activity remind me of the cellar I live in. They're humbling more than uplifting.
15K visitors is nevertheless kind of cool. (7.5K if you subtract the ubiquitous bots. Still a lot by my standards.)
UPDATE, 6:30 p.m.: over 20K now. Bots are piling on, I guess.
I don't follow my stats, other than a weekly email I get showing my averages (usually around 250 unique daily visits). But I had a stat counter in the past that showed where the visitors were from. I always found it interesting to see that a Czech or a Turk or whatever had stumbled onto my turf (likely never to return).
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