Who Knew "Coconut Crab" Would be so Hot?

It's enough to drive a blogger to distraction.

About a month ago, I posted a micro-review about AbsoluteAstronomy.com's writeup on coconut crabs. ("The Coconut Crab: No, It's Not From a Science Fiction Movie" (September 25, 2009))

Then, I moved on to the next task of the day.

I enjoyed putting that post together more than most: the monster land arthropod looks like something out of a better-than-average science fiction movie, and it's quite real.

But I didn't expect that post to be particularly popular. I'm fascinated by arthropods with branchiostegal lungs that allow them to scuttle on land - and up trees: but I've long since learned that my interests and those of about 999 out of a thousand people don't have all that much in common, when you get beyond basics like grilled steaks and the opposite sex.

So, I was surprised when that coconut crab post kept showing up near the top in my daily logs.

Then today, so far, it's accounted for over 75% of my traffic. Total. All eleven blogs and three websites. (Shameless self-promotion: A Small World of Websites™)

The 'extra' hits are all, or nearly all, from Google. Why? I have no idea, although there seems to have been a serious spike in the last hour or so. My blog post is in the top 10 (9th place), so there must be something that's driving interest in coconut crabs today. This afternoon.

My guess is that there's some television program that mentioned the things.

Traffic Spikes, Research, and Common Sense

Whatever's driving this spike, I'm glad it's happening: and won't spend more time wondering about why it happened.

My business is a sole proprietorship, with me as owner, manager, writer, research department, janitor, and anything else that needs to get done. Knowing what drove this spike would be nice - but beyond filing what I've found away with the rest of what I've noticed about traffic, I don't have the resources to find an answer to that question.

Besides, the answer probably wouldn't help me. Aside from concentrating more on 'cool' subjects than I might otherwise, I plan to keep writing posts for that blog, Apathetic Lemming of the North, the way I have for the last couple of years. In that blog, I focus excursively on topics I'd be following anyway, like:

• Martian speleology
• Interior design
• City planning
• Visions of the future
• Cute and funny animals
• Artificial intelligence
• The weirder end of high fashion
• Cosmology
• Architecture
• Anything else that looks interesting

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I've used this quote fairly often:

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."
G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905), The Quotations Page

And, from Tennyson's Ulysses:

"...this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought....."