A Confused Time
October 26, 2009 in Blogs
An odd thing happened last week. There was an abrupt, brief, and unexplained surge in readership of my Examiner Temporal Anomalies articles. On Friday the readership skyrocketed, but by Saturday it had plummeted relative to other articles on the site. I have yet to determine how or why this occurred. In any case, I have published the new one, Bender’s Big Score part 5: Tut, Tut, Tut, which continues to consider problems surrounding the intermillenial crime spree. It will be interesting to see if there’s another surge this time.
Meanwhile, I’ve been battered about quite a bit with too much happening too fast and me unable to keep up with it all. C. J. Henderson dropped me a note to let me know that his new Teddy London book The Sleep that Rescues is finally and formally in print, and so I can polish up that review I wrote some time back and get it posted–but not tonight, as I am already running out of time with too much in front of me. Hopefully that will go up this week, though, and if I manage to catch him at Ubercon I’ll get a real copy of it. (He has also alerted me to the fact that he will be there Friday night only, and I’m already curious why, as that does not strike me as the best time to be there.)
In any case, there’s too much to do and too little time, and I’ve said that already so rather than repeat myself again, I’ll move to everything else.
–M. J. Young
Eric said on October 27, 2009
There have been plenty of times where Instapundit linked someone, and a flood of visitors went to the targetted site. This is called an ‘Instalanche’. Sometimes this used to be so much that the site in question would go off-line, or use up all of its monthly bandwidth.
There are other people who can shift significant attention like this and the name for this is usually ‘their name’ lanche, but Instapundit was the first that I’m aware of to have this be a noted phenomenon.
So you may have had an A-list blogger note you, or perhaps someone on Slashdot.
And I agree that Friday is not the big day at most cons. Saturday is.
M. J. Young said on October 27, 2009
I thought about that possibility, but there are a couple of quirks. First, the surge was not that significant–I’m still building an audience out there, but I get about half the “average” page views each day, which is between forty and sixty (I get), as it fluctuates. On that one day I surged to about twice the average–around two hundred. I’ve been hit by that kind of thing before–when the Temporal Anomalies site was on GeoCities, it crashed once when a blogger posted it, but it was not a terribly well known blogger, and the traffic surge was hundreds.
The other quirk is that it died instantly–the couple days after the surge my share was significantly lower than it had been. Had it been a link on a blog or something like that, the norm is that it would peak quickly and then roll back to normal gradually. This peaked quickly and then dropped to well below normal immediately.
There are a few sites that post recommended links on a daily basis, and I might have been hit by one of those; but the only one I know is IMDB, and there’s no indication that they did so (I post announcements of each article on their recommended articles board, but have yet to get any response). Besides, I’m told that when your link lands there you’re going to get thousands of readers, not the level I saw.
So I’m still mystified. My best guess is that the people who have been watching the series all jumped on the latest post and then didn’t come over the weekend; but that does not seem to have happened again with the article I posted yesterday.
–M. J. Young