Seekers
I’m an ordinary guy with an ordinary blog. Think of me as a small neighborhood business, The Caregiver’s Tales. Forty or fifty people a day stop by my website, mostly via Facebook, to see what’s up and go on about their day. No big box. No video. No noise. So, imagine my surprise last week, when I had close to 200 visitors on two separate days, a nearly 600 percent increase, and they were going to my blog, and they were coming to it direct, as in not via Facebook. That’s a traffic spike. I was excited. Then I looked deeper and tempered my excitement.
Over the last 30 days, while 54 percent of my traffic was from within the United States, the second largest country of origin was now China at 24%, with thirty-five other countries accounting for the remainder. I wondered if maybe a Chinese English class had decided I’d be good practice, but it’s probably just the government doing it’s thing, because the hits came from all over the country in large cities and that seemed coordinated. Although correlation does not mean causality. For all I know my blog got mentioned somewhere and several hundred Chinese citizens clicked in to see what was up.
Maybe I’m on the verge of something, although I really have no idea why I should think that. Mostly, I’m just curious. Why would someone in Uruguay click in or Singapore, or fourteen people from Kyiv in Ukraine? What’s up? How do I even show up in Brazil? Am I badder than nationwide? I doubt it. It’s probably bots, but I prefer to imagine people seeking comfort, looking for calm words, a little bit of normal, and the internet has given them a world in which to look and now they’ve found me for better or for worse. So, howdy stranger. I see you.