Not BSO but my blog has been visited with some record high numbers lately. It used to average around 250 visits per day. But lately I got 386 visits on one day (12/28) and even 435 visits on another day (1/5). So are there just more arduino users out there or are there just more internet bots or crawlers for the new year?
Yah, mine has been up, too, since December. Maybe lots of people are getting them for presents?? The incoming and outgoing link stats look pretty human to me.
One RadioShack store I visited sold out UNOs and has some Ethernet shields and MEGAs on shelf (possibly the UNO's price attracted gift givers with geeky friends). The other store I visited told me they sold arduino pretty well, no returns so far. This year might mark a big gain in the arduino fame and user group number.
My blog went up as well. However the intra day timing hints at more users, not more bots. There seems to be no correlation to your blog though. 12/28 go me 345 hit which is something about average. 1/4 got me 569 and 1/6 got me 560 but 1/5 only got 412. Probably a lot of people got an Arduino for Christmas.
I am pretty sure that this is not bots because the relative distribution of the page hits did not change. Especially the pages with close to no hits did not rise. Bots would crawl everything evenly, wouldn't they?
Today I discovered that the local hole in the wall electronics shop in my neighborhood is selling Arduino. The owner said it was selling like hot cakes. Cannot keep them in stock.
maniacbug:
Today I discovered that the local hole in the wall electronics shop in my neighborhood is selling Arduino. The owner said it was selling like hot cakes. Cannot keep them in stock.
Maybe pass my info on to the store since I sell arduino hardware too 
One RadioShack store I visited ran out of UNO but still has a few MEGA. The price break works wonders. $30 is "let's buy this for geeky Mikey" but $60 means "I am geeky enough to advance to level 2".
It look like it is going to be busy on the Forum.
9,181 visits so far for the month of January. Please help! Last two days. Let's make it over 10,000 this month! 
New user here from Dublin, Ireland, not a bot 
I got an Arduino Uno last week & having great fun with it...
P.S. I have a theory, I got an android phone recently & was introduced to arduino because it was under the android category on some page, I thought WTF is arduino & the rest is history 
liudr:
9,181 visits so far for the month of January. Please help! Last two days. Let's make it over 10,000 this month!
Hey dude, you broke under 2 million Alexa ranking. You'll be in six figures soon!
maniacbug:
liudr:
9,181 visits so far for the month of January. Please help! Last two days. Let's make it over 10,000 this month!Hey dude, you broke under 2 million Alexa ranking. You'll be in six figures soon!
I didn't know Alexa ranking until today! Is it a popular tool to research website stats?
BTW, I searched arduino.cc and sparkfun.com, and my university vs. a rival university in our system. We beat them in the ranking! Are we more popular or are our website harder to navigate so people make more clicks to find things?
breadbeard:
New user here from Dublin, Ireland, not a botI got an Arduino Uno last week & having great fun with it...
P.S. I have a theory, I got an android phone recently & was introduced to arduino because it was under the android category on some page, I thought WTF is arduino & the rest is history
Welcome breadbeard! Yeah, google has used a version of arduino for their android development kit (ADK). For a more direct use of your android phone, get a bluetooth shield and a bluetooth transmitter for the shield. I just finished a library that makes you transition from actual buttons to android. You can "press buttons" on arduino over bluetooth serial port. It's cool!