Sudden massive jump in Google Analytics stats from many locations.. then back to 4, 5 visits a day

My website recently went through a massive stats jump according to google analytics and I have no idea why. A few different things have happened with my little blog over the last couple weeks but nothing I can directly relate to this event.

Here's some screenshots:

The Dashboard for the past month with April 16th tagged

The Dashboard data for April 16th specifically

The U.S. map for April 16th (sorry for the small font, had to fit it all in)

Canada

Let's see.. three visits from random places in India, three from random places in Austrailia, five Malaysia...


Ten of the fourteen visits from NY are easy to explain.. while a high number for my website per day those did come from here in my town. I'm sure friends saw my updates on facebook and other people have subscribed to it through e-mail and RSS, so those are accountable.

One more note.. The Average Time on Site is pretty irrelevant in blogs, if I understand correctly, because it counts time spent on one location before going to another within the page. If the blog is read from top to bottom then exited it will count as 00:00:00. Actually, most of my visits are the three sets of zeros.. one other thing on this that is different from my regular data is the fact that some of these have a couple minutes written next to the visits.. which means clicking back and forth on blogs that are short and completely readable like posts.. one after another. :???:

The only differences that I can possibly think of..


- There was some thread I posted about selling photos from a website (it bombed, no responses). I quickly realized this might seem like shameless self promotion and removed my website link under my username for the time that the thread was up.. actually.. I never put it back up. Here's the link to that thread, just found it, but it was the 17th, so no dice. It does bring up the possibility that my blog was accessed through that link under my username by some group or bot on the 16th.

- I posted a few blog posts in a couple days instead of my usual one per month.. maybe two posts per month.. Right about this time. (by looking at my page.. actually on the 10th, 15th, and 16th.. actually the last two were just before and just after midnight). The post on the 16th actually is a bit different.. rather than posting keywords like lake, building, sunset, [town name], etc.. The blog had the tags "robots, flying robots" and my name. That might have something to do with it.. But really, how many people are looking for that blog and would actually stick around to read lots and lots of my posts.. when the topic is nothing especially special, just my hobby.


Oh, and I'm registered through the networkedblogs facebook app.. which.. a grand giant total of like 20 people are subscribed to on facebook. I don't know if that puts me into the whole networkedblogs website (I never bothered to go there and check because I only use it for the facebook app subscriptions).



That's just about all I can think of.. Any ideas on the spike? I'm very very confused as to what caused it.

On further investigation I found that there were some comments I'd missed (I know there's some way to set it so they're forwarded to me or whatever, I just never bothered). They're from the 16th, two of them, and they're by blogger.com bloggers. One was spam, well, specific spam, whoever was doing the copying and pasting of "check out this blog!" at least said "Nice photo! I like the blah blah blah" before their little ad. I deleted this one.

The second one was just a very short comment by someone saying "cool", pretty much.

One was on the post of the 15th, the other of the 16th, both posted on the 16th (and I guess I found one of my Argentinian visitors, based upon his profile info).


Now I suspect blogger.com for suddenly sending them my way.. why? Is the "Next Blog" button not random but sometimes features some people? (I sometimes use it to see how other people formatted their blogs for ideas)

Were my different keywords than usual a factor? If they were, they didn't visit the newer posts specifically, almost all of them visited the main blog page and read the posts chronologically from there.