Last fall I noticed that my website was getting a lot more visitors than normal. The vast majority of those were from Asia. A quick web search showed that lots of small sites like mine were experiencing the same phenomena. Late in the fall I got a mention in National Geographic and those visits skyrocketed. Interesting but not really of much value to me since they resulted in no inquiries or reservations, which is the actual point of my site. A change in the way that comments were verified all but eliminated the pesky comments with links to some other site that sometimes resulted from that traffic.
Yesterday I heard a piece on Public Radio and learned that these days around half of all Internet traffic is machines visiting sies for purposes we can only imagine. I can only guess the value in visiting and reading all of those blog posts on this site. Training your language model? Studying weather patterns?
I have been reading through the last 20 or so years’ worth of those posts with the long-term goal of perhaps a book about my life as a working guide or at least a fun diary for some future generation. Many are interesting and even entertaining but one thing you can take to the bank is that they are written by a human and come from real experiences and are not machine generated!
I would have never guessed that simply being a genuine real person would need to be verified in modern America but here we are.
Add new comment