I promise this will be the last to say about my vasectomy and the remarkable blogospheric response to my account. But I had to share with readers this observation, something that may only be of interest to other bloggers who like to examine their reader statistics. Here is the distribution by country of my last 4,000 site hits:
I've never had this concentration of non-North American hits since my early days of blogging when Terra Sigillata was the clue for a UK Telegraph crossword puzzle.
But why the Swedish concentration for the vasectomy post? Do the Swedes have an unusually high prevalence of interest in the procedure?
The best I've been able to figure is that the post has been on a Swedish buzz site: buzz.bazooka.se. Like Digg or Reddit, readers can tag posts of interest: we were the lead post on Friday. ("Minst sagt hängiven bloggare.").
What I find most striking though is that Digg, Stumble, and Reddit most often given sharp but short spikes in traffic. Buzz from Sweden has been giving me steady traffic since Friday morning and while it has dropped off over the weekend, referrals from that site are still running at more than 50% of my traffic.
I'll have to find out if my archeology blogging colleague, Dr Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaeology, is behind this.
As an aside, the Swedish buzz also lists ten comments on my post, one of which seems to postulate that my vasectomy was a hoax.
I can assure you that this is not so.
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"As an aside, the Swedish buzz also lists ten comments on my post, one of which seems to postulate that my vasectomy was a hoax."
Of course.
The ol' 'fake-vasectomy-blogpost-to-draw-Swedish-and-other-readers-in' trick.
Why did we not see that coming..??
...sigh...
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...tom...
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"This looks fake" or simply "Photoshop!" is a long-running meme on the buzz website. A variation thereof generally turns up in the comment section of every single link.
Oddly enough my original visit to your little snippet of a post probably appeared to come from Stockholm, even though I'm physically in the UK. My work intranet connection disappears into Scandinavia (don't ask).
Maybe they thought it would be illustrated.
Well if you wanted to skew your visitors to be a little less Swedish, perhaps someone could link to your post from Fark?
I actually dropped by your blog via Pharyngula's post titled "Snip Snip". However my first thought was regarding thumbs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinwHOZ2Erw
I can take no credit as I was off-line skiing in the mountains at the time. But I speculate that Swedes, being unusually gender-equal, may be particularly receptive to vasectomy.
It's been pretty amazing, Martin. Unlike Reddit or Digg, the Buzz has given the blog quite a long tail of increased traffic. Thank you, Sweden!