Last night I was reading an article on LifeHacker which was recommending a free webcam software called Yawcam. This is the exact same webcam software that I discovered earlier this year and which I used to run BoomerCam. A few months ago we moved some furniture around so Boomer no longer has a "perch" in front of the window anymore, but the camera has remained in operation, just pointing basically nothing. Since I've been using the Yawcam for a while, and I could recommend it to others, and provide an example of the software in action... I decided to post a comment to the article (the first comment) and I included a link to BoomerCam (along with a disclaimer that Boomer wouldn't actually be seen).

LifeHacker is among the most popular blogs on the entire internet, garnering over 500,000 visitors every day from all over the world. In less than a minute I heard a little beep sound that tells me when somebody is viewing the webcam. And then another. And another. Realizing that this was just the beginning of a massive wave of coming BoomerCam visitors, I decided to give the viewers what they really wanted. I quickly cleared off the table which the webcam was pointing to and threw Boomer's pillow on top. I then got Boomer and put him up on top. He was confused at first (and Hobo was jealous) but pretty soon he just laid down and went back to sleep.

Every time I heard another beep I would reach into the shot and wave, which was quite often. According to comments on the LifeHacker article and on my original BoomerCam blog post, people seem to like me waving to them. I later added a "Boomer is dreaming of LifeHacker" thought bubble to the shot. The beeps kept coming. At times it was as often as every few seconds. And it just kept continuing all night long, well past when I went to sleep.

My computer was still beeping constantly when I woke up this morning. Since we couldn't keep Boomer up there all day we eventually replaced him with a jack-o-lantern. And I'm now writing this blog post over 24 hours later and it's still going, and going, and going like the energizer bunny.

On a normal day my website gets about 100 visitors, viewing about 200 pages. In just the past 24 hours since I posted my comment on LifeHacker, over 800 visitors have visited my website and viewed over 1,400 pages... and still counting. Even though I get nothing out of this spike in traffic, it's pretty cool to see so many people visit.

Labels: blogging, dogs, internet