If you're like me, you want to know whether anyone's eating the meat you grind out from the butcher shop of ideas called your blog. Sure, there's some measure of pride and ego involved: as your stats move ever upward your sense of confidence inflates proportionately. So does your sense of importance and pride. We all want at least a little touch of fame.

Problem is, unless you get a lot of comments on your blog, it's difficult to know how many subscribers you have reading your feed, or which posts are getting the most attention, or whether your visitors are first-timers who never return, or old die hards who just can't get enough of your tasty cuts. Yes, traffic analysis is more than just pretty charts, it's a window into

Looked at my traffic logs a couple days ago...

Who died and left me all their traffic? It’s not like I blogged on Britney Spears or Anna Kournikova or anything lately. Did I?

Oh … wait … It’s gotta be Berry.

Since I blogged about Justin Berry (the former "camwhore," now believer, now States' witness, now media sensation) a while ago (here and here), I already had pretty good search rankings for my post, and it's been a steady, popular page. But yesterday our local Chicagoland media-mogul diva Oprah Winfrey blew the roof off my blog just by inviting two guests on her show, Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald—the reporter who outted him, saved him, and now “handles” him.

Look at the graphic at the right. This insane Mt. Everest of traffic spikes is entirely due to increased visitor traffic via Google from searchers looking