Multiple gulping spiders

kw: blogging, blogs, spider scanning

Nearly two months ago I posted about what appeared to be a periodic internet spider that seemed to be grabbing about 30 posts at a time in this blog, roughly every 4 hours. A few weeks later, such activity increased. Today I find that it has increased again. Have a look:

These are hourly hits for the past week. The prior increase was to roughly one 30-hit session each two hours. I think now there are several spiders at work, and it is hard to tell how many posts each one is getting. There is also a shift in the source of the activity. Prior to the past couple of weeks, most activity was based in the US. Now:

In this pair, the left side shows one day's activity (nearly 900 hits total), and the right side shows one week, the week shown above. Clearly, the US activity has held steady at around 210-220 daily hits, while Russia has ramped up to dominate my "audience" just in the past two or three days.

Does it strike you, as it strikes me, that the sudden boost in activity starting late on Dec. 16 coincides with the threats against Russia made by President Obama in his latest news conference? It looks like they are targeting a whole lot more than just political operatives! I mean, I am probably one of the lowest-rated bloggers out there, and I write at most one politically "interesting" post every year or two.

Thus, I wonder just who in all that immense country called Russia is really Hoovering up data from my blog. Fellow bloggers, if any of you happen across this post, check your stats, and their pattern since mid-year. I am sure I am not the only one. And I'd like to hear from you.

This activity doesn't concern me much. It isn't hacking. I have about 80 to 100 legitimate daily readers. Most of them stumble across the blog and seldom return; I have no more than a handful of followers. The only annoyance to me is, I don't any longer have a good handle on how many actual readers come to this blog. The spider activity swamps that signal almost out of existence. Oh, well. Maybe they'll get bored and go away.

I find it amusing to think that, just perhaps, the KGB has some poor analyst reading my posts (at the rate of a couple of hundred per day?) to find out what is interesting. Or maybe they have a really smart AI doing relevance searches. Has anything been passed along to Wikileaks? If any human is at the other end of one of these spiders' pipeline, I counsel you to get a more interesting hobby! It can't be my stellar writing style.