Looked at my traffic logs a couple days ago...

Who died and left me all their traffic? It’s not like I blogged on Britney Spears or Anna Kournikova or anything lately. Did I?

Oh … wait … It’s gotta be Berry.

Since I blogged about Justin Berry (the former "camwhore," now believer, now States' witness, now media sensation) a while ago (here and here), I already had pretty good search rankings for my post, and it's been a steady, popular page. But yesterday our local Chicagoland media-mogul diva Oprah Winfrey blew the roof off my blog just by inviting two guests on her show, Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald—the reporter who outted him, saved him, and now “handles” him.

Look at the graphic at the right. This insane Mt. Everest of traffic spikes is entirely due to increased visitor traffic via Google from searchers looking

Yesterday my blog stats tripled. Nay: quadrupled. With six new random comments on my previous Justin Berry post (“Justin Berry: From ‘camwhore’ to water-baptized witness for the State”), I figured there’d been another major media piece on Berry’s recent lifestyle change and cooperation with the Feds. Little did I know that both Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald had appeared on the local media-diva’s talk show: Oprah. And I didn’t even Tivo it.

The links to the Oprah show content follow my comments.

“She can not take it any more, Captain!”
One thing concerns me, even more now that I’ve seen Justin’s hollow-eyed, thousand-yard stare in the Oprah.com screenshots: Justin is ripe for a meltdown-burnout-crisis. There’s a scriptural injunction against “laying hands” on anybody suddenly—it’s not a proscription against Pentecostals praying for strangers, and it’s not advice about

Today I felt my heart lifted even as my gut was wrenched. Kurt Eichenwald, writing for The New York Times, ditched a traditional rule of journalism by becoming a compassionate part of the story. And The NYT pulled out all the stops, backing him every step of the way. Three cheers for Eichenwald and the NY Times!

Update 12/30/05: Kurt Eichenwald updates us on the aftermath his series of articles have at least temporarily wrought in the online pedophiliac camworld. From the article: “The shutdown of the portals, all of which have been in operation for at least four years, came days after an article in The New York Times described how minors, often with the assistance of their online fans, had begun operating pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by Webcams.” Child Pornography Sites Face New Obstacles (New