I admit, I’m pretty vain when it comes to my blog. I don’t advertise it or spend hours obsessing over search engine optimization. I don’t use Feedburner (yet) or Google Analytics to obsessively pry into my readership. But I take a look at my server logs and I’m pretty curious who comes here.

My traffic is a modest 1,000-2,000 visits a day, 20,000-30,000 unique visitors a month. For a locally-focused blog, I guess that’s pretty good (so everyone keeps telling me), though it’s nowhere near the readership of even a tiny local newspaper.

Whenever I start thinking I’m all that, though, I usually get a good swift kick in the pants when someone much more popular links to me. A single link from Patrick Lagacé, for example, can easily double my traffic on a given day. MtlCityWeblog also ranks highly in terms of incoming links.

And then there’s Fark.

Fark is like Slashdot (for whom the “Slashdot Effect” is named). Small-time web hosts fear these popular websites because of the insane spike in traffic they are reported to provide.

So you can imagine my concern when I saw that a bunch of people were coming here from Fark.com. It turns out a thread had been posted there linking to my recent CRTC roundup featuring the new Canadian porn channel. That thread then made it to the main page, which resulted in thousands of web surfers being directed here.

Thousands, but not hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands. My statistics show only 7,000 people clicking through to the page (Fark’s counter is above 8,700). Turns out that’s about average. Some popular ones might see 15,000, and those promising pictures or other goodies might go up to 70,000. But barring some “epic thread” it doesn’t go much beyond that.

Perhaps Fark isn’t as popular as it once was. Perhaps with the Internet as huge as it is, there are fewer large gathering places with the power of God behind them.

Oh, and to save you some time, here are the thread’s highlights:

• Rita MacKneels
• The Great White Load
• Roll Up the Rimjob
• Edmund Fits Gerald
• 2 Girls 1 Puck
• Montreal Triple Expos
• Summer of 69
• The Littlest Homo

There, I just saved you 20 minutes.

In related news, my blog hit its 200th Google Reader subscriber recently. It kind of gets me that I have more blog subscribers than Facebook friends. Added to subscribers through other feed readers (Bloglines, Newsgator, Netvibes, Livejournal — in that order), the number comes up to somewhere between 270 and 282.

And that doesn’t include people who read the blog the old-fashioned way.

Now how do I cash in on this new-found fame? Where are those groupies they always tell me about?