Thanks for the link Glenn! One pitiful blogger's saga of being "King for a day." (Or at least "Prince for a day.")

Hi y'all! Got a story to tell you. I guess you could call this "When good fortune comes your way #2" for the day. Except, it's not nearly as funny as the post below.

On January 3, my friend (not just a virtual friend), CosmicConservative, posted about receiving an "Instalanche." Now, truthfully, I did not know what an "Instalanche" was, having never heard the term. But, in the screenshot he posted, I could clearly see that his web traffic had increased by over 10-fold in one day. So, being the astute fellow that I am, I assumed that he had been linked to by some big-time blogger.

After a quick Gooble search of the term "Instalanche," I discovered that it is when Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit links to your site, thus driving massive web traffic your way. I was happy for Cosmic. He's a smart guy, and a good writer. I hope a bunch of folks found his blog because of his Instalanche.

So, mostly as a joke (trying to get a grin out of Cosmic...which is not so easy to do, btw), I posted the exact same photo that drew Reynolds' attention, as a Blogsperiment. If you read Andy's mess every day, you already know about this. And, of course, the conclusion was that web traffic at Andy's Place stayed steady at a paltry just under one hundred visits per day. That is what I expected.

Little did I know when I woke up yesterday in a grumpy mood, that I'd get one of my biggest chuckles since I started blogging. Behold the POWER of Glenn Reynolds, and Instapundit:

(Click on it, and marvel...)

Yep, that is 6,851 visits for Jan. 5, 2010. That is an over 70-fold increase in normal traffic. I had been Instalanched! Man, have I had a big ol' grin on my face over this for a day and a half now. I felt almost like blog royalty yesterday. It was good to be me!

So, always one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, I began to ponder just how, and why the Instapundit took notice of my foolish little junk. I developed this scenario in my mind:

Glenn has someone that works for/with him that continually searches the net for info to link to. (Heck, I don't know...maybe he does it himself...but it doesn't fit my scenario). As said person is searching the net, he/she comes across Cosmic's mention of an Instalanche, and my link to it, and my pitiful attempt at humor. Said person sends an e-mail to Glenn.

Glenn,

There is a pretty good blogger, CosmicConservative...you know, that guy you linked to with the picture of the contortionist/acrobat/archer chick. It seems that there is some yokel named Andy that is just fascinated by that, and made some lame try at being funny about all the traffic you drove to Cosmic.

I read Andy's blog for a while, and he obviously doesn't have a clue. Why don't you check him out, just for the yuks!

Then, said helper drops a link to Andy's Place in the e-mail, and goes about their business.

Glenn moseys on over to Andy's Place, and looks around for a while. After several hours of reading posts...looking for something...anything that he can link to without embarrassing himself, and finally comes upon a post that he can use to prove to ol' Andy just how powerful he is (and that he's a nice guy).

So, he decides to throw Andy a blog-bone, and gives him a link.

I think that's probably about how it happened. Probably. Maybe. Probably not.

I know that you are curious. Was it one of my really funny personal stories, or one of the stellar political analysis pieces I have written, or my prayer request for Keith Olbermann, or why I don't trust the Chinese? Nope! It was this. Yep, a copied e-mail that my old retired buddy down in Florida sent me. Sigh...

Oh well, a dog'll take a bone any way he can get it. So, thanks for the link Glenn!

As a side note, though the traffic has slowed down quite a bit today, hundreds of visitors are still accessing that page. Many of the visitors are coming from PeakOil.com, ZombieHunters.org, and dozens from The Facebook, and e-mail links. Thank y'all, too! I mean it.

I suppose that that particular post will bring traffic for a good long while, as the link propagates from computer user to computer user. I never knew there were that many folks with computers that would be interested in that, or I'd have posted it a couple of months ago when I received it.

But then again, only 96 folks would have seen it back then, if Instapundit hadn't thrown me a blog-bone (under my likely/maybe/probably not scenario).

The world-wide computer is a funny thing, huh?