I can’t say I like the implications, but they bear no news for me even if my worst suspicions are correct.
The folks who host my websites and e-mail collect statistics on usage. I check them at least once a month and track them to help me keep things in perspective. For example, my four websites had a total of 8,679 visits in November with 30,432 pages downloaded from them (minus the anomalies below).
Of those visits, a lot of them are 30 seconds or less, most likely search engines taking snapshots of my sites so they can be included in results when people ask for information. Visits of 5 minutes or more are also tallied and more meaningful to me with over a thousand of them per month.
But the Bitterroot Bugle had A HUGE JUMP this month with 6,491 visits and 15,7373 pages downloaded by itself.
Whoa! Did I suddenly get extremely popular???
I looked a little deeper – the statistics logs let me do that. In the day-by-day data I find that 4,500 of those visits and 5,000 of those pages happened on November 21st and 22nd … 69% of the visits and 32% if the pages in a day or two?
Even more impressive, that volume was blazingly fast – didn’t skew the number of visits 5 minutes and longer. This was one big data pipe transfer from my site to somewhere (close by?).
What’s that mean?
I can’t know, but I can suspect. For sure I cannot count that as a trend. I subtracted those numbers from my tracking chart. They aren’t part of the slow, steady growth in readership here.
As for my suspicions … Well, my website is hosted in Orem, Utah which is only 21.67 miles from the new NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah. Perhaps around November 21st NSA finally got its computers up and running without causing the fires that have plagued them at the shiny-new Stasi super-snoop factory.
No matter. I know they are watching me. They are watching you too. Privacy is liberty. We won’t have either until enough of us want it.
Meanwhile, wave to the nice little empty-headed drones who are as valuable as tits on a boar. I can almost visualize their break rooms with posters on the walls about fighting terrorism, spreading democracy and what great heroes these cubicle dwellers are. PUKE! Do something useful with your lives, gang. Go on welfare. Anything but fueling the destruction of what once was a free country and feeding the lecherous psychopaths at the top.