A spider blast

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

I thought yesterday's spider outbreak was the peak. The peak is being sustained, or perhaps I should speak of a range of peaks. Here is the profile of views in the past 24 hours (captured at 10am):

A simple, twelve hour sawtooth burst. At the peak, 3,012 views per hour is almost one per second. To me, that seems like a lot, but I considered popular blogs that have millions of followers; they probably have thousands of views per second. Nonetheless, the barely visible background rate of perhaps four or five per hour is what I consider normal for this blog.

The geographic chart carries little useful information:

I didn't even bother opening up the "Other" section, which encompasses 43% of the 20,700 hits in the past day. A more normal day's activity would consist of less than 100 views, 2/3 from the US, and a total of no more than 20 countries.

I have been attributing this to AI/LLM training. Now I wonder whether the various AI Assistants such as CoPilot and Gemini 3 are performing blog scans as part of their "research" when answering a question. That seems to me better than the prospect of all this activity being only for LLM training.