Friday, March 11, 2005

the Nicole DeHuff phenomenon

This post is about the oddity of web traffic stats and how they affect me personally. I would say that I'm a casual observer of stats when it comes to baseball and traffic that checks out any of my web sites.

Lately I've been noticing a marked increase of unique, first time visitors to my Thumbprint.org siteby people who are looking for photos and information about Nicole DeHuff. For about the past month, I would say that I've had about 50 to 75 people per day hitting my site for that reason. A portion of my site includes a small write-up about Suspect Zero with lots of photos from when Tom Cruise's production company rented our place in the Washington Apartments to film the sex scene (which was not included in the final cut) between Nicole and Aaron Eckhart.

At any rate, I got real curious yesterday when the number of unique visitors topped out at 811, and shattered my record for a single day of web traffic. Why are some many people suddenly interested in Nicole? Well, she's dead. Apparently she died of pneumonia on or about February 16th and was soon after cremated. That sucks. I suppose her claim to fame will be that she was the girl who got her nose busted playing volleyball in the swimming pool in the movie "Meet the Parents."

At any rate, already today, my website has logged 9,868 unique visitors... and it isn't even noon! Interestingly, I'm also noticing some spill over of people checking out my other web sites. I wonder if any of those people will navigate all the way over to my blog.

Well, I have things to do, so I should get doing them. I will update the stats later... perhaps as comments to this post. Plus, I also have an exciting story to tell. One that ended up being a good thing for several people while narrowly escaping being a tragedy for one or a few.

7 comments:

AlbuqwirkE said...

As of 2:12 pm, the count of unique visitors to my site today (Fri. March 11) is 24,622.

Complete insanity!

Anonymous said...

lol.;
thats how i got here.

my story may or may not be indicative of others', but i read on yahoonews that she died, and im thinking "who?!" so i did a google image search and your photo of her is the first one that came up, so i clicked it and was at yr site. and now im posting a comment on yr blog.

AlbuqwirkE said...

Hah! That's great. It is a quarter past 10 pm and the count of unique visitors for today has reached 34,402.

AlbuqwirkE said...

Well, Friday's visitors totaled 35,168. Marked decrease Saturday though with only 8,203 unique visitors (still more than 100 times my normal amount of traffic in a 24-hour period).

AlbuqwirkE said...

Sunday's total was 1,549 unique visitors.

AlbuqwirkE said...

Monday, March 14 = 1,771 unique visitors

Anonymous said...

I just watched "Without a Trace" and saw "In memory of Nicole D. Huff". Turns out it was Nicole De Huff. That is why I am searching.

So sad to die at 31. Especially from something so common and normally non-fatal to young people.