A colleague who has lived in Moscow mentioned recently that the Russians officially regard any blogger who receives 1,000 or more hits a day as a media organisation.
Yesterday, Salut! - or rather the Salut! group of sites - got within a whisker of having to apply for our official status to whoever deals with such matters at the Kremlin. If you added the people who visited in today's small hours, the application would still be necessary.
There is usually a specific reason for a sudden surge in hits and yesterday was no exception. An article by a fan of West Ham United, Sunderland's next opponents in the Premier League, attracted Hammers fans in large numbers to Salut! Sunderland - and took it to the heady heights of number 78 in the Soccerlinks top football sites.
Previously, interviews with Kate Rusby and Rachel Unthank, folkies both (and that's Rachel in my first picture), had a similar effect on the readership levels of Salut! Live. And links from other sites occasionally bring in additional visitors in more modest numbers to wallow with me in County Durham nostalgia at Salut! North (not Salut! Live as this posting read until Bill Taylor's rebuke appeared below).
Salut! itself toddles along with a strong bedrock of support, and the hit rate occasionally rises and falls for no obvious reason.
I can say, because the good people at Statcounter tell me these things, that the most popular items or groups of items at each site have been:
* Salut! .....several of my postings about life in Abu Dhabi, and especially one describing some colleagues' introduction to shisha, though many people also seem to find items about Lord Deedes and my life in France interesting.
* Salut! Sunderland.... the Who Are They? series, of which the West Ham article - and another example, this time from a Chelsea supporter - form a part, although my interviews with celebrity and scoundrel fans of Sunderland also attract lots of people.
* Salut! Live..... the star interviews (in so far as folk music has stars) already mentioned; note that the picture of the Animals above relates not to anything at Salut! Live but to an interview with Alan Price at Salut! Sunderland about his boyhood attraction to Roker Park.
* Salut! North..... the most popular? Perhaps least unpopular is the more accurate phrase, but I suppose articles covering a Bransonesque attempt to become a teenage entrepreneur and my earliest searches for romance have attracted fairly respectable reader figures.
To new readers of any of these sites, who may have come from references at Petite Anglaise, the Shildon Town Crier, The Other Side of Paris or the contributor profiles section at my old stamping ground, the Guardian's Comment is Free pages, may I extend the hope that somewhere in Salutland, you find what you were looking for.
And welcome to my media empire. But please accept that since I am at present helping to build another, gaps may appear between new entries at all its outposts.
Masochists among you may, of course, explore the thousands of words to which signposts appear all the way down the left hand sidebar of Salut! - and, from one last photograph, taken by my friend and colleague Stephen Lock, get an idea of just how busy I am being kept.
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