Quite a week for this blog. A startling surprise link in MacSurfer, and later ones in OS News and two French Mac sites, led to more than seven and a half thousand extra visitors for the month than were expected. I had been anticipating about 2,200 visitors, perhaps another one or two hundred, but the massive news-site links blew the month’s stats clear into next year, to say the least. There were more than 3500 visitors per day for the first two days of the link, followed by 900, then averaging out to about 400 per day for the last three days of the month. The monthly total for September was precisely 10,009.

All this is rather overwhelming, considering my modest initial expectations for the blog. When I started out, I thought that I might be lucky to get a few dozen visitors a month, friends and family and the like. The Japan Blogger’s Webring brought in some business, but then Google started kicking in, as well as inbound links from other sites. Even without the links from the Mac sites, I was already averaging more than 150 visitors per day (250 per day at the high end of the scale) and, as noted above, more than two thousand visitors from unique IP addresses per month–well on the way to break three or possibly four thousand by year’s end.

That is, in a rough way, kind of equivalent to having a good circulation for a small-town newspaper, and as such, reinforces my views of the Internet being a breakthrough for the voice of the common citizen. Before the Internet, web pages or blogs, if a person wanted to make their views know, they would have to petition a very small class of people–editors and publishers–for the right to do so. Newspapers, magazines, books, television or radio were pretty much the only way to make one’s opinions widely-known. Being published not only required the usual prerequisite of being a professional writer (save for the small snippets in Letters to the Editor and such), but also depended on one person of that privileged editorial class deciding that your voice could make them money. These obstacles made it very difficult for any but a tiny few to have their voices heard beyond family and friends, or farther than one could shout from atop a soapbox in the park, and the monetary angle presented an unrealistic view of common opinion, often trying to shape it more than representing it.

Then came the Internet. The World Wide Web allowed ordinary people to publish private content for worldwide view, links made it possible for people to direct attention to sites of genuine popular interest, and blogs made this private content more organized, easier to enter, search and view. What we have now is an open market, a place where awards and voodoo Neilsens do not. The narrowcasting standard of the net is a more true representation of what people want to see; however vulgar it may be at times, it is nonetheless more honest. Some corruption is already leaking in–advertisers receiving artificially high ratings on search engines, spammers cheating and stealing to manipulate traffic their way–but the democratic core of the Internet still stands.

Support the blogs you find with your attention; read more than just big media. And whenever you get the chance, let your own views be known as well.