The Price of Fame

When you hit it big there are unfortunately some downsides and I have recently learned this after hitting it big with this blog.  Did you not notice that this blog blog had hit the big time?  Well, it has.

It all started a couple weeks ago when I noticed I had a couple comments from new people saying they were going to start reading the blog.  Great!  Then I randomly looked at my stats page, like I do a couple times a year for kicks and was stunned to see this graph of my blog views:

You have to ignore the huge drop at the end cause that's for only 4 days (and no posts) of December. Look at that exponential increase over the last couple months! Finally my genius is being rewarded! And this was about the time I noticed my comments page was blowing up. Of course I went to check out the comments to read all the bloviating glowing comments about my writing prowess. And glowing they were. Except they were all oddly vague. Sort of the type of comments you could write and then post to any random blog you stumbled upon. Then I noticed they all had links to the commentors purported blog as well.

And that was the point I realized I was getting SPAM-ed and that I wasn't as cool or popular as I thought.  Sad day.

But I do find it curious and interesting why/how I got hit by all these SPAMers all at once. Does someone really pay people to go out and do ridiculous things like this? It's almost as dumb as the company that was paying people to surf the internet back when I was in college. Being engineers we of course figured out all kinds of ways to get past the requirements of keeping the mouse cursor moving and navigating to new pages every so often while we were away at class.  I actually made a few hundred dollars doing nothing, and it was awesome! It seems someone else has figured out how to get past another paid advertising scam's rules. Good for them, but it's quite annoying for me. Hopefully it doesn't happen again cause I don't want to have to add that impossible number/letter test thing to the comments section. I fear it would overly annoy the three people who leave comments.