Yesterday this blog received the third highest number of visitors it's ever had in one day when 8269 people turned up. They weren't all fascinated by the sale of council houses in Havering, strange as it may seem, nor were they keen to check out blue plaques on the former Teddington Studios. Instead the post I wrote last month about All The Candy Stores On Oxford Street got picked up by two behemoth American syndicators - Hacker News and Boing Boing.
The majority of visitors arrived from Hacker News (at news.ycombinator.com), particularly during the few hours when the link climbed into the top 30 on the front page. Over 200 comments were left - that's over there rather than over here - and it was fascinating to watch the debate running increasingly out of control. The top comment started "The real story here is that over the last 12 years of UK government, austerity policies have cut back all public services to the point where they don't actually exist" and tumbled rapidly into politically-based irrelevance. Most other commenters were keen to dissect the murky world of shop-based money laundering, with one taking me to task for not doing this myself (which I hadn't done because I didn't have any proof).
As for Boing Boing they sent fewer folk my way and garnered fewer comments, mostly from Americans who thought candy shops were normal and who'd never been to Oxford Street, so not as interesting. But I wouldn't have hit my third highest daily visitor total without them, and they very nearly tipped it up to second.
You'll probably be wanting to know what my highest number of daily visitors was, so here's the Top 10.
Some of these were because I'd spotted something genuinely newsworthy, some were repackagings, some were independent research and some were just serendipitous good luck. Twitter was responsible for blowing some of them up, also Reddit, also Time Out, also the QI Elves, even BBC London. For comparison's sake this blog normally gets just over 2000 visitors a day, and on only two dozen occasions have I ever topped 4000. It's amazing that sometimes things just take off, and probably reassuring that you can never quite predict what, where and when.
