Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Diary of an Instalanche, Part I

So yesterday, I'm minding my own business, tending my little blog in this quiet corner of the blogosphere, content with my modest audience of relations, YLS students and a small handful of conservative Catholics. Then the BlogFather posts on his favorite alternate-history novels. I write an e-mail, suggesting he look into a book in the genre that's a particular favorite of mine, and then put up a somewhat-related post over here. Then I went bowling.

By the time I got back, I discovered that Professor Reynolds had linked to my post, and that I was experiencing what's known as an Instalanche. This little blog, which had never gotten more than 68 hits in a day and which was averaging around 35 hits or so a day for the last couple weeks, got approximately 200 hits between the time of the initial link and 11:00pm (for reasons unknown, my eXTReMe Tracking software thinks I'm on Newfoundland time). In the last 20-odd hours, I've gotten around 660 more hits than I would have normally gotten. (You can see a visual representation of the spike here.)

I imagine most of these hundreds just looked quickly at the post and left, putting the Fox behind them forever. But if even 1% of those people become even semi-regular readers, I'll increase my readership by a third or so. It's a big day.

Also: some of the people who came here from Instapundit have been voting in the "A or B?" poll. Interestingly, they've been voting overwhelmingly for A or B, helping each to mount a comeback against C, which had been dominating prior to yesterday. I guess Instapundit readers are less anti-authoritarian, or just less skewed, than Mansfield Fox readers. Which is cool.

I'll post again later, with more reflections, after this wave has passed.