aunty...

First, a commercial break.

You want free, invisible, real-time stats? These are your chaps.

They have pretty pie-charts and everything, and whenever you click on a magnifying glass icon you get up close to the details of whomever has linked. For someone unused to the bright lights and glamour of full-on stats, their detail is headturning.

Which is how I’ve come to have a little mystery on my hands. Not as tricky a mystery as Blue Chamber, which I’m buggered if I can do. I’d reckon it’s on an easy-peasy par with ‘A bloke is hanging, dead, in a locked room. The room is completely empty apart from the man and a pool of water below him – how did he die?’ sort of thing.

Here we go:

A woman sends a link to her journal to a person working in a big company, to their company address. There is nobody apart from the person in his office at the time the link arrives; he sends the link to nobody.

The woman’s stats show that the person clicked the link twice; the host name given is the servers of the company.

Shortly after the first click, and around the time of the second, the same company’s host name shows up next to search engine entries for the specific name of her journal, which was contained in the link sent to the person.

The person to whom the link was sent only clicked on it, they did not use search engines, they did not have to.

Could I just say, that if the search engine user feels they might be passing my house earlier than the person to whom the link was sent, on an evening when I send them a shopping list through their company email, feel free to pick it up and pop it over.

You’d be helping.

I know the Greater Manchester / Lancashire border might seem a tad far for you today, but it could look different soon.


...or big brother?