For my blog Google Analytics has gone weird

I occassionally look at the Google Analytics for my blog in the slim hope it might tell me something about the level and nature of interest (or lack thereof) from my audience.Until a few months I thought the data was somewhat meaningful and believable. It gives data on the number of views for the whole blog and for individual posts. It also provides information for specific countries.Until a few months ago, there were (supposedly) about one thousand page views per day. A typical post would attract a few hundred views within a week of posting and sometimes up to a few thousand after a few years.However, the graph below shows how daily traffic increased dramatically at the beginning of August, rising to several thousand views per day![apologies for the poor quality of the screen shot... click on it for higher clarity]Of course, at first I thought that this was exciting and flattering. However, I quickly realised this was ridiculous. This can be seen by looking at the breakdown by…