Hooking people with or without link bait

My previous post about the iphone was deliberately misleading.
It was titled “iPhone on sale in Ireland”.
I of course have no idea when the iPhone will be on sale, I merely gave my opinion on what I’ve seen of the product and its features.

This is probably the first time I’ve created what could be called Link Bait. Link bait is meant to be controversial or sensational, often giving a strong opinion on a subject that is bound to create intense discussion.

My example hardly goes that far (link shrimp bait maybe?) it’s just an enticing headline about a popular subject.

Some people may find this kind of headline annoyingly misleading but even so, my iphone page has become the second most read article on this blog (ever) despite only being written 3 days ago. I can see that this could be a great way to increase readership.

I’m delighted about a second way in which my pageviews are increasing but slightly confused also.
I check my statistics regularly to see how many visits I’ve gotten and if any of them have followed links on other sites to get here. Until recently there have been few surprises.

There’s a few from my user pages on forums I frequent: wickedfire,Richard Dawkins’ Forum and Irish Webmaster Forum.

There are others from sites that I have had link exchanges with – visible on my frontpage in the sidebar.

But now there are sites that I have never visited showing up. Naturally I click through when I see an unfamiliar site in the list but I have yet to find a mention or an actual link to scoby.ie on any of these sites. So why do they show up in my referrer list?
I thought it might be someone faking there referrer so that curious webmasters will click through and view these sites, but none of the sites seems particularly targeted at webmasters.
I’m not unhappy about traffic coming here, the more the merrier. But I would like to know why.

Any/All explanations/conspiracy theories gratefully accepted.