I keep a lot of pictures on Flickr, over a thousand, and part of the pleasure I get from that is to examine the "Flickr Stats" available each day to see how people are finding their way into my pictures. When I check out the usual links on my stats page, most are to simple things like Google searches. So I have no trouble figuring out how the link was made, why that user was brought to my picture, etc. But almost every day I also get reports that someone has linked to my Flickr stream pictures (different pictures from day to day) from a certain blog. With these blog links I don't understand the connection: there's nothing on the pages of the blog that would indicate a link to my Flickr stream.
They are almost always transformed links, by the way: for instance, today it was through a gu.ma link (like TinyUrls). They always lead to one or another page of that particular blog. When I wrote the owner of the blog, he said he had no knowledge of it. I don't doubt his word. Mind you, the blog sure doesn't read like much common sense . . . try it yourself: today's link went to
http://www.pnarp.com/2010/03/07/When I posted something about this to a discussion group (on Flickr) about Flickr Stats, I got an auto warning that it would not allow me to post anything about gu.ma since that domain had been implicated in spam runs on Flickr accounts. Of course, Mr Yahoo in his own best interests keeps Flickr users from finding out (at least very easily) what that really means. And I haven't found out.
Anyone have a suggestion for what could be going on?
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