I've been on a vacation from making posts recently, mainly because I've been so busy at work and home. Certainly not because I don't love my readership... all 3 of you.
Anyway, I thought I'd take a peek at my Google Analytics statistics and found that - despite my absence - my readership is growing healthily, getting bigger by the day. How wierd is that?
Well, there might be an answer to this: Grisoft's AVG v8.0 virus protection. It turns out that the latest version (optionally) installs a browser plug-in, called "LinkScanner", that will ping all search result websites to determine if the site is malicious. Although it's an interesting idea, many statistics are gathered from web logs, and these logs are getting artificially inflated due to this extra ping.
I'm not sold that Google or Microsoft analytics are getting artificially inflated, but it certainly could be something to watch, as web masters get more riled about their unnecessarily inflated bandwidth.
More reading: