So What's Up with My Blog Traffic?!

Here's my blog traffic over the past year, from June 2006 through May 2007. You'll notice it teeters along, with minor ups and downs, at something over a thousand hits per month. Perhaps a very gradual upward trend. Until these past few months, when all of a sudden my blog traffic shoots up into the stratosphere. Over 6000 visitors for the month of May? Traffic quadrupled in just a few short months?!

Can somebody please tell me what's going on here?

Not much of the increase can be attributed to new visitors. I'm pretty well familiar from my blog stats with our regulars— a handful of regular commenters, and a handful of regular lurkers too. I have at least one regular lurker who's been there ever since this blog began back in 2004. And I've picked up a couple of new readers in the past few months. But nowhere near enough to account for this astronomical increase in blog traffic.

A closer look at my stats indicates that part of it comes from picking up a few persistent high-traffic links. But by far the greatest part of the increase seems to be due to an ever-swelling number of visitors arriving here by way of Google Image searches.

Google Images. The great majority of my traffic comes from Google Image searches, and these have ballooned beyond all proportion in recent months. Though again, can somebody please tell me what's going on here? Many of my newly popular images have been there for a long, long time. Russian chronograph, triceratops, Uma Thurman, Irish sport of hurling, school bell, kabbalistic tree, Shogi, Chess, playing cards, state quarters. So why have they begun drawing mass quantities of visitors only in these past few months?