A slight landmark for The Hump yesterday – for the first time we hit over 20,000 hits for the previous month. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year.
It’s very tempting to put it down to hacking activity, but in fact the readership for each new article has gone up by about the same proportion. Hooray!
A very large part of the increase this year has come from France, which currently registers very nearly as many hits as the USA (and a whole lot more than native England, sad to say), and even more than Sweden.
The spam possibility occurs to me there, as most of the hits from France show no city of origin. However, I don’t think EU-regulated France is renowned for clandestine cyber attacks, and those I regularly get from the state sponsored organs in China and Russia show a different pattern – many hundreds of hits over a day or two, coming from every town you can find in the atlas. Even a small-time blogger like me can see what the old Eastern bloc is up to.
So maybe the French interest in what we have to say is genuine, and if so I hope the translation plugins are doing a good job for you, or that you like reading English. Still, it would be reassuring to know something about you guys, since there appear to be so many of you.
Voulez vous, peut-être, poster un commentaire ici, à votre convenance?
Hey you get some from canada too. Cool its from France. They seem so not in these matters like most europeans.
I believe evangelic;la protestesttism/Calvinism in france was the orgin, on a curve, for the high intellectual accomplishment of the upper classes there. however unlike England it did not go into the vast majority of the middle/lower classes. Then with their religious war and defeat of the Huguenots it was the end of their keeping up.
The modern french might be ready for better ideas since they now are a prosperous people.
Well, we’ll see if we get anything from the horse’s mouth. I’ve actually come across believers from pretty strong Evangelical churches in France (in Bordeaux, for example), but they’re relatively few and far between.
As for the Huguenots, a bunch of them co-founded my own church, together with demobbed members of Cromwell’s army, back around 1650. They took the surname “French”, which was common in the neighbourhood until the 20th century. And my wife’s ancestors were Huguenots too – France’s loss was my gain!
Regarding Canada, I’m afraid your Hump readership lags well behind Ukraine and Russia, though it does span the country from Vancouver to Montreal.
A further thought: President Erdogan of Turkey has labelled the ANZAC Gallipoli campaign of World War 1 as “Islamophobic.” Both the Australian and New Zealand governments have protested at this, but given the word’s catch-all usage by the left, it’ll be interesting to see how they refute his charge.
What ideology inspires Erdogan? Is it as hateful and in need of purging as that of the Christchurch murderer? Does it have a name equivalent to “Islamophobia”? One might say Erdogan is just one rogue politician: but on the other hand, whereas Tarrant might, perhaps, inspire some other ne’er do wells to try and emulate his act of terror, Erdogan already has an army of well over 600,000 at his disposal. Seems a bigger danger to me.
Well, I got no replies from our French brethren. But here’s an interesting thing: since Saturday 13th April, hit-rates for The Hump have suddenly plummeted, and it’s overwhelmingly due to the disappearance of nearly all the French visitors who had put their country even above the USA in Humpophilia. Now they’re a measly sixth.
Given that most of the geographical locations of the huge French invasion were not identified, I can think of two possible reasons.
The first is that the French have given up the Internet en masse for Holy Week. Somehow that seems unlikely, and I can’t find any evidence for it anyway.
Secondly, that the mass-coverage has, all along, been part of Mr Macron’s decision to boost France as a cyber-espionage power to rival Russia or China. And now, either they’ve lost interest in the important revelations being made on this site… something to do with the arrest of Wikileak’s Julian Assange, perhaps.
Or else the same Intelligence Units have all gone on strike (only secretly, being spies and all), so that there’s nobody left to pay attention to The Hump of the Camel.
It’s a bit disappointing being less popular than I thought. But it’s still intriguing to be of so much interest to Governmental Agencies across the globe!