42 Minutes of Fame

Regular readers may have noted the big jump in readership numbers on the counter at right between Monday and Tuesday. All of a sudden the Visitor Map is populated with dots from all over the globe. I was totally surprised by this when I looked at the blog yesterday, and I've been poking around on SiteMeter to figure out where all these hits came from and why. I now know the answer to where, but I have only a theory about why.

Between 9:09 and 9:51 p.m. on Monday, Home Stories received 92 hits from around the world. (Normally Home Stories gets 8-10 hits a day.) The referring URL for all of them was from within Blogger, on the Nav Bar. All I can assume is that Home Stories became the "Next Blog" that people who were simply browsing hit and saw in that hour. The previous post, "Blooms Abound Indoors" went up exactly an hour earlier, at 8:09. Apparently one of those three words is key to getting noticed!

Most of the 92 hits were for 0 seconds, which means the browsers just clicked and went on. Among those who stayed to look at more than one page in Home Stories were viewers in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Ontario, Tokyo (working for IBM, browsing on the job!), Argentina, Honduras, Singapore and Costa Rica, as well as Utah and Indiana. The first hit in this virtual meteor shower came from a viewer in Benton,Ill. and the last one from Singapore. (And somewhere in the middle of all this frenzy, Debbie B in Hutch managed to get a look, irrespective of the other hits. Amazing.)

The prize for the longest look goes to a viewer using Spanish in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. He or she stayed on for almost 25 minutes looking at two pages. Perhaps practicing translation skills?

Anyway, it is fascinating to get a glimpse of the huge international reach of the "blogosphere" as Doug likes to call it. People in Canada, Brazil, Australia, India, the UK, and multiple US States also took a look, even if they didn't linger. It's also amazing how many people out clicked on the photo of the maple tree. Guess I'd better go take today's update photo now that the sun has come out!