Monday 19 August 2019

Blog bots?

Here's a wee impromptu blog post. My last few posts have been read much more than previous ones. Colonised in particular has been read much more than any other of my posts, by a factor of about three. I don't know who is reading, if they find the posts useful or ludicrous. I wonder if my blog is attracting non-human traffic for some reason I haven't quite been able to imagine yet. Most come from the USA. None of them leave comments or contact me.

Owners of other blogs will know that some of their views appear to come from a link in another blog which usually turns out to be advertising porn or some other 21st century service - I, the blog owner am the target. Seems an elaborate way of sticking adverts under the noses of just a few people, of uncertain customer potential, when it's cheap and easy to buy lists of email addresses. Anyway I don't think these constitute most of this recent traffic.

I can imagine that people googling "Fanon, colonization, MacKinnon" (the last for the feminist academic Catharine MacKinnon) might find my blog by accident, look briefly and decide it's a complete red herring for the topics they're interested in. That might explain the viewing figures, at least for Colonised - albeit in a way that's disappointing for me. It doesn't explain the upsurge of interest in my other, recent, rather random musings.

So here's a wee blog posting with almost no content, certainly little that will be interesting to very many other people. I wonder if bots are attracted to anything that gets mentioned on social media so no tweets, etc. Will it be seen?