Blog Traffic

I'm very busy with other things this week, so you won't get a lot of extensive blogging out of me, but I wanted to share this with you: my blog traffic is up. Yuge! I have noticed this before: sometimes my traffic just spikes. The first time it happened, I knew exactly why: I got an Instalaunch, which is a spike in traffic from being linked to by the Blogfather, one of the first and most popular bloggers Instapundit, which is the nom de blog of Glenn Harlan Reynolds, professor of constitutional law at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). He doesn't publish numbers these days, but he used to get around 800,000 page views a day. That is equivalent to a regional paper like the Boston Globe. The Drudge Report gets six million a day, or used to, probably more now. Anyway, when I got the Instalaunch, I was typically getting a few dozen page views a day. Suddenly I got 3000 in a half hour, just like that. This was in August 2011 and the blog was just a couple of months old. As the traffic grew over the months and years, I soon got to several hundred page views a day.

From time to time, and lasting a month or so, I seemed to be getting extra large amounts of traffic that didn't seem to correlate with actual human visitors. My comments didn't increase, for example. I decided that this was some sort of web spider or programmed browser that was visiting my site for some unexplained reason. It usually goes away after a while. But in the last couple of weeks it is back more than ever and I am getting almost 2000 page views a day. In the past month I have had over 32,000 page views. I'm not complaining exactly, but it is a bit of a puzzlement. How much of the traffic on the web derives from some sort of mechanical intelligence one wonders?

Sorry, don't have time today to do a real post, so this will have to do. But I will share a performance with you. This is one of the great pieces by the Paraguayan guitar master Agustín Barrios in a performance I recorded a while ago. There are three movements, Saudade, Andante religioso and Allegro solemne. Most of the images are of Barrios, but there are some of the church that was supposedly the inspiration for the second movement: