Once upon a time I was honoured to be noticed by the great Instapundit.

Readership shoots up fleetingly if the Professor links to you on his site, as his readers run into the hundreds of thousands. Ditto Guido.

An Iain Dale link too is much prized.

But to get a link from Daphne Caruana Galizia? Now you're talking!

Malta's population is something over 400,000 people.

Daphne's readership is said to be close to 100,000 per day.

Can that be right? If so, that means that almost every person in Malta is either looking at her blog at least once a week or talking to someone about it.

She has achieved a national readership of utterly awesome proportions.

Why?

For posts like this.

I hear that Malta still has the offence of criminal libel and that some people may be trying to get Daphne convicted under that heading.

Seems a bit unlikely to succeed with her ratings at that galactic level?

Who'd want to be the person applying the handcuffs?

Just to be 200% clear. I have no idea what she is talking about. Maltese politics and personalities are a subject about which I know nothing.

It's the phenomenon I'm interested in here.

A quite new form of democracy is evolving under our noses.