You applied to 25 companies and got responses from 17? That seems like an extraordinarily high response rate. Your process sounds pretty normal, but my understanding is that most people who follow a similar process get a much lower response rate. Why do you think this is?
If I was guessing, I'd say that I very consciously made my CV/cover letter/blog "intriguing". I'm an OK programmer, but at the moment my strength is probably that I have a diverse list of fairly wacky and mostly unrelated other stuff that I've done. I think this meant that a lot of companies who would otherwise have passed straightaway were at least curious enough about the guy on the other end of this application to talk.
I should point out that after a Skype or 2, most of said speculative companies did realise that whilst founding a clothing company that makes sweatshirts with pictures of fruit on them is cool, it doesn't really help you write Clojure when you don't have any functional programming experience ;)
Of course, it could just be something boring like the fact that companies really need Ruby guys at the moment.
