A life of its own

I was dog tired after my 21-hour day photographing the lunar eclipse and sunrise at the Isenberg Crane Reserve outside Lodi so I waited to post a short story and photos of the eclipse until Sunday night.  I wrote a brief story and uploaded eight pictures of the eclipse and put them on the website just after 9:30 p.m. on Sunday.
I checked the story before I went to bed and saw 1 comment and a handful of views on the web counter.

Arriving at work this morning I checked the website homepage and noticed something odd.  The eclipse story was at the top of the most viewed articles?  How could it get a couple thousand page views overnight I wondered.  Top stories usually have at least 4,000 page views or so and then I noticed the web counter on the eclipse story. Shortly after 10 a.m. the eclipse story I posted Sunday evening had already tallied 110, 218 page views.  WTF?!?

Now 4:30 Monday afternoon and that same story is at 111,527 page views.  Somehow the story made it the Google or Yahoo search engines and a query for "Lunar Eclipse" calls up my story and pictures as a result.  It's kind of weird how things take on a life of their own on the internet.  My photos and story have been bouncing around the globe and may have been viewed all across the country and other continents.

it just seems odd to me how a photo taken in a dark. chilly field outside Lodii is suddenly seen everywhere.  My photo made to to some science website where the photo was linked with images of the eclipse collected from San Francisco, Los Angeles,  Pheonix Arizona, Sidney Australia and Rikuzentakata Japan.  How does a photo from a wetlands near Lodi fit in to the global picture?

A Google images gallery even had some of my Snapshots blog pictures from the eclipse.  It is true once it is published on the web it takes a life of its own and can appear in the least likely place you might think.  The story now I guess is our most viewed web story ever, easily surpassing our Sandra Cantu coverage, and it did that in less than one day.  It will be interesting to see what the final tally for people viewing the story will be, I'm guessing it will come close to the 150,000 mark and then interest will die out.

Nice to know someone thought my pictures were worth seeing, I guess it made my cold wait in the morning mist worth it.  Funny thing I think the sunrise photos I took right after the eclipse were the best shots of the morning.  Maybe I will have to look and see if they are making their way across the globe too.