[geek][random] Musing on site visitors...

While my hit counter is pretty chimp simple, I do pick up some interesting tidbits every now and then. For instance, at the height of the blogstorm over Microsoft's backing away from gay rights in the state legislature, I was visited repeatedly by IP addresses from MSFT's PR firm, Waggener Edstrom, who were doing Technorati searches. When I wrote a snarky piece about patents and Smuckers' Crustables, I was visited several times by IP addresses from the JM Smuckers corporate network (doing Google searches... no, they don't quite understand blogs yet). I also get a bunch of hits on 2 pieces from people doing image searches: my '30-second science blogging' piece on the first photo of a planet outside our solar system, and my 'strange fruit' piece on racism. Okay... come for the images, stay for the writing? Nah, I'm flattering myself. But there're others that make me go 'hmmmm'. Not in a bad way, just 'hmmmm'. Like the visitor the other night who translated my site into Chinese. I braced myself for some comment spam when I saw that referral, but nope - no spam. Just someone reading my site. In Chinese. I know how badly the automated translators work - they're good for rough approximations, but not a whole lot more. I wonder how stupid I sound in Google-translated Chinese?