It really is extraordinary weather here at the moment. We’ve had the longest run of snow that I can ever remember and there is more forecast in the coming days. It’s been coming in thick and fast, followed by the wind blowing it into drifts and off the trees then more comes down.

It’s hard to tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. BTW - the sky actually wouldn't be in this shot at all on a clear day - all you'd see is hillside.

Sometimes I feel as though my pbase experience is a bit like that. Let me share a few stats with you, which are strange to put it mildly. I like stats as you know, having a thirty-year-long career in market research.

When I was doing my PAD, I’d get around 200 hits on each new photo within about 3 days. In the first 12 hours, I’d generally get 100 or so hits. Overall, I’d average 2,000 hits a day on my galleries overall. When I stopped doing my PAD, I expected to see my hits slip down and dwindle away to nothing. This didn’t happen. Not only did it not happen, but it’s almost impossible to see when I stopped my PAD if you look at a long term trend. Now, with restarting a photo diary, my hits on individual photos have not really increased to any great degree, although I’m now seeing my total hit rate in a day peaking at over 3,000 hits on around 1 in 10 days. Weirdly, my pictures are still meeting my previous rates, although they’re burning more slowly at the start. This may be because I’m not in the PAD meta-gallery (because I’m not doing a PAD).

Overall I’m finding myself having to draw new horizon lines, to separate my world from my sky. I’ve learned that the PAD meta-gallery did NOTHING for bringing people into my galleries – I MUST conclude that if the hits have neither gone down nor up since leaving it. It must therefore be also true that most people are finding their way into my galleries through search engines rather than through pbase channels. I conclude this on the basis that the photos that are generally at the “top of my pops” are ones with strong “stories” to go with them. However, I’ve also learned that old friendships remain strong and I stood the test of time by staying in people’s “favourites” on pbase for longer than I’d expected because the number of people welcoming me back was much higher than anticipated.

So, even after drawing these new lines in my world am I still shocked and amazed at a particular photo suddenly finding its way to the top of my pops (by miles), getting 300+ hits a day. It started five days ago, and since then the number of hits has been phenomenal. The pic has little or no text so it’s unlikely that it’s found its way to the top of a search engine or is the topic of conversation somewhere because people either agree or disagree strongly with something I said. It's also right at the bottom of my page of galleries so anyone glancing down the list would need to go to some effort to see it. Furthermore, there does not seem to be any follow through into the rest of the gallery or elsewhere.

Where should my line move to now?