BLOG STAT PHENOMENA
This is not usually a high stat blog. I average about 45 hits per day.

A few days ago Rudy linked to my story about Tim Stafford's article on the church. I figure that Rudy's link generated over 300 hits to my site each day over the past two days.

So, I decided to check the sitemeter this afternoon to see if his link was still generating hits. Much to my surprise I had over 1,000 new visitors to the blog -- today! How could that be? Rudy's link wasn't going to generate that much traffic this many days out.

I looked more closely at the sitemeter and found that all the hits were going to an archived page from three days ago which simply contained a link to the tsunami video. At that point my best guess was that some search engine spider had found the link today and that the site was popping up on searches. I tried google first, typing in tsunami and video. And there it was in the #2 spot. Mystery solved!

How google decided to make my link #2 I'll never know. There are hundreds -- even thousands of blogs linking to that very same download site. So at least part of the mystery is solved. Google itself is still an unsolved mystery -- but that's another matter.

As of 9 p.m. (PST) the sitemeter has registered over 6,000 hits today for this blog. Most won't ever read this post because they're only going to the one archived page with the video link. But it is an interesting demonstration of just how much power google wields.

BTW, I am planning on keeping my day job. My popularity as an Internet pundit will be shortlived -- indeed, everyone is linking to the post with the least amount of commentary. Not much ego satisfaction there.