Hurricane DEAN: Gone, But Not Forgotten With Dean no longer a threat to Jamaica, the work involved to return to normalcy is probably well underway. However, it is not completely over. Dean is now a CAT 5 hurricane and heading towards Yucatan.

An unexpected result of Dean's passing has been the huge increase in web traffic to this little blog. At the time of this post, it has attracted 553 hits (or 785 page views). As funny as this may seem, that's a huge number for this site.

Before Dean came into the picture, I was lucky to get at most, 50 hits per day. Then I started tracking Dean and that's when the traffic started to climb. What really sent it shooting was, I think, two things: 1) The fact that Barbados was the 'first country' that Dean was going to pass. Look at a map of the Caribbean and you'll see what I mean. 2) The post entitled: "Hurricane DEAN: Pictures From Barbados." Google loved that. This blog showed up on the first page of results for the query: "hurricane dean pictures."

Now that Dean has passed (and hit) other countries, and now that other people have taken pictures and uploaded them to the web, the traffic to this site will steadily decline. I'm already seeing it happen. Over the weekend, I was getting anywhere between 20 to 30+ hits per hour. The last hour resulted in only 11. Google is probably tired of this blog and is finding other pages. As such, my position in Google's returned results page is starting to drop.

This is not a big deal. Don't get me wrong, it was exciting while it lasted. I never intended to attract huge numbers to my blog by covering natural (or man made) disasters. It just happened. Why? A friend of mine (who works in the newspaper biz) had this to say on my amazement at the increase in traffic:

"nothing boost blog hits like bad weather or war..."

Indeed. A similar situation is the way most of us slow down while driving to observe a car accident on the highway. Or why we watch the television whenever there are reports of violence and mayhem, or read about such things online, or in the print media. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It appears to be human nature.

In conclusion, I wonder, is it reasonable to ask why we (or a decent-sized portion of the human population) are fascinated or intrigued by death, destruction, violence, suffering, mayhem and that sort of thing? Or is the answer to that question obvious?

Labels: Caribbean, hurricane, life, weather

10:10 PM