Where the Online Traffic is Going 78
vitaly.friedman writes "While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information. The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year."
Localized wikis (Score:5, Interesting)
Local information sites ARE growing. Sites like Bloomingpedia [bloomingpedia.org] (city wiki for Bloomington, Indiana) are getting lots of new articles, editors and interest from people all over the place. There are also other city wikis starting to pop up here and there and I just started the first State Wiki for Indiana [indianawiki.org] last week to help centralize information about the DST change here.
I think a lot of people are starting to get there information from wikis in general because they are showing up so high in searches for information. In just the past couple months, we've been getting lots of search requests for restaurants around Bloomington.
I guess this is the evolution of information on the internet. First it was "fan websites" in the 90s, then directories of information, now localized wikis and blogs.
Especially mashups and blogs are skyrocketing (Score:1)
Re:Localized wikis (Score:1)
A Manifestation Of the Cultural Diffusion (Score:1)
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry =the_cultural_diffusion [realmeme.com]
Alexa (Score:5, Informative)
Check out Alexa's Society Category [alexa.com]. It's rife with the named blogging machines and even Slashdot!
All the report provides is the sheer visiting numbers and the rate of increase over the past year. And give proof that Tom [myspace.com] over at MySpace is laughing all the way to the bank. You may call me a karma whore but that man has 68475709 friends!
Re:Alexa (Score:1, Troll)
People who visit this page also visit: The Register
Sad..
Where is all the traffic going? (Score:2)
Re:Alexa (Score:1)
Timely news source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.
Hey Alexa! Some of us use freebsd, you insensitive clod...
Basic trends (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason for growth with the other sites is because of basic marketing treads they are cool, they are new, myspace has grown because they offered a unique service that people picked up on, blogging is also a major area of growth the fact that blogger.com is tied to google is a likely reason why they are going better than a lot of their competitors, as for wikipedia, it is a one stop shop for all your information needs that and it has a great google ranking it is an unsual day for me to perform a search on something contained in wikipedia and not have that entry returned on the first page.
Re:Basic trends (Score:1)
I agree. The traffic to my domain has been increasing at a rate of over 20% per month. I run several blogs there along with a podcast. I keep the content fairly fresh. It is Google searches that drive in a majority of the new traffic to my site. I do get my share of traffic from other bloggers linking to me, but Google is my friend. Another interesting traffic generator for me is my iTunes store. I am averaging over 20K visitors per mon
Re:maybe it was marketing... remember Friendster? (Score:2)
Remember Friendster? That was around long before Myspace, but it didn't take off. Maybe it was better marketing or a fluke...
But Myspace wasn't the first nor was it unique.
Re:I, for one (Score:2)
Re:I, for one (Score:1)
This shows the maturity of the inet (Score:4, Interesting)
Maturity? (Score:1)
Re:Maturity? (Score:2)
Internet can actually be really mature, even though I do agree with you that most Internet users aren't. They are distinct concepts...
Re:And what's interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
What I find most interesting about this trend, is that "social" interaction carried out online is world-knowable. Anyone who wants to look at, use, or even track what you do online, can do so. It's not like going to a party for a drink and then leaving for the day- it's like going to a party and having everything you do etched in stone so that a nice little memento can haunt you forever.
It will be most interesting to see how much fallout those who participated in sites like MySpace will endure as a result.
Re:And what's interesting (Score:2)
Re:And what's interesting (Score:2)
Re:And what's interesting (Score:2)
Re:And what's interesting (Score:2)
Re:This shows the maturity of the inet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pr0n? (Score:1)
Re:Pr0n? (Score:2)
Re:Pr0n? (Score:2)
If people only realized... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If people only realized... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If people only realized... (Score:5, Funny)
Quite a point. Google sees everything you do online, and a cunning questioner can get more information about you than you might think.
Some script kiddie got into a webforum I rather liked a few months ago. Obsolete version of Invision with more holes than a Sierpinski gasket. He Defaced it, deleted stuff, the usual crap. Gloated about his leetness under his leet hacker's handle.
Which led to other places he'd posted.
Which led to other names he'd used.
Which led to a website.
Which had a whois record.
Which had a phone number.
Which was answered by his mother.
We got a photo of him from his eighth-grade spelling bee, too. Cute kid :-)
Re:If people only realized... (Score:2)
Re:If people only realized... (Score:2)
A server where I work (not one of mine) was hacked once. The guy put an IRC bot on it. We logged in to the channel pretending to be the bot and when the hacker came along, we got his handle. Much like the parent's story, knowing his handle eventually lead us to his university email account. We provided all this to the FBI - and nothing happened.
Re:If people only realized... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is true. Education is definately the key.
There is a high level of fear-mongering going on in the media. I have users come to me asking, "Should I block my child from Myspace? A reporter on the news last night said my kid is in grave danger using Myspace. Is he right?"
The problem with getting your technical info from *insert popular news show here* is they are rarely getting their info from real net savvy people. Add to that, fear makes good ratings. There is a risk of children seeing objectionab
Re:If people only realized... (Score:2)
Well, du-uh! Live Journal is so much cooler.
Re:If people only realized... (Score:1)
Where the Online Traffic is Going? (Score:3, Funny)
Wikipedia's popularity (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia's popularity (Score:2)
Weather.Net and www.PoliticalKitchen.com VLOG (Score:1)
Traffic is going Grassroots (Score:5, Informative)
People are tired of being force-fed information that they may or may not deem useful and have no way of responding to that information.
Blogs and related ventures will be much more popular than corporate-only websites, and that is a good thing indeed.
Re:Yea right... (Score:2)
TVs don't have keyboards, so there isn't any way to interact with them.
Re:Yea right... (Score:2)
Interesting point, and the evidence appears to partially bear out your argument. I hear about more and more of my acquaintances disconnecting cable and only using their television set to watch movies. My fiance and I had separately stopped watching broadcast/cable TV before we met (wasn't all that important to me, but it was a nice bonus).
At some point, we may reach a tipping point of people who don't watch TV, or only watch specific content on their TV's (l
Re:Traffic is going Grassroots (Score:2)
Nothing here is surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this something else that is supposed to be news? Huge "super-sites", the website equivalents of multi-national corporations (Yahoo, Aol, MSN) have slower growth rates than new sites with much smaller userbases. 5% Growth in usage of Yahoo.com is still HUGE, when you look at the numbers. That's nearly 6 million more users, which is about 1/5 of Myspace's entire userbase!
This whole article seems to be stating the obvious. Trendy sites are growing quickly. Huge sites are growing not so quickly. Useful sites continue to grow at a steady (fast) rate. Is there something shocking, or newsworthy, mentioned here?
FreeCycle: Localized & Efficient (Score:4, Informative)
Freecycle [freecycle.org] lets you give or get free stuff in your community with minimal effort.
It's very important that each Freecycle node is geographically localized, e.g. one city, so that you're offering/accepting only to/from people for whom the offer is geographically practical. For this application, the internet does not annihilate geography, it only minimizes other transaction costs of offering/accepting free stuff ... but that's plenty of benefit!
Example: Seattle-area uses [yahoo.com]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycleseattle/ [yahoo.com]
"Virtual preening" (Score:2)
And CitySearch is big-time now? What's next, Starwave? Pathfinder?
more more and more ... (Score:1)
What goes around comes around (Score:1)
Humans are social animals, isolated geeks not withstanding. We have always loved interaction with others. Back in the Commodore/Apple II days, BBSes were extrememly popular. Then came national/global entities like America On-Line and Prodigy. The message and chat areas were enormous draws to those entities. Of course, Usenet replaced BBSes when the Internet became the rage, but people were then turned off by spam and trolls.
So, now blogging and other social web sites
Re:What goes around comes around (Score:1)
IMO:
Best place to get info from experts on a specialized topic is still usenet, whether you post regularly to their group or not.
Best place to get very specific info on any topic from WWII to Wrestlemania is Wikipedia.
Re:What goes around comes around (Score:1)
Where do you want the traffic to go today? (Score:2, Redundant)
Myspace (Score:1)
Myspace as of Feb. 2006 has 54mil accounts.
180k more accounts daily...
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/myspace.htm [howstuffworks.com] (yeah whateva, thats my source)
Anyways... yes. The internet is changing, as users are given the ability to share opinions more freely and the average user begins to value those opinions more and more, the internet effectively becomes more human.
After all, an article posted by a professor is a bit more raw than one shoved pa
Re:Myspace (Score:3, Funny)
Funny. That's what everyone always said the Internet should be about. People freely exchanging ideas and conversations. Now everyone is bitching about all the stupid people and stupid sites. Just can't please anyone...
Is slashdot being affected? (Score:3, Interesting)
My blogs have seen a decent increase in traffic over the 4-5 months I've been writing them. When they were e-mail newsletters (opt-in only), I had about 8000 readers, most of which have NOT returned to my blogs on a daily basis. As more people learn how to use RSS feeds properly, though, I'm starting to see more feedburner access than ever before (about a 400% increase in 3 months).
I'm amazed at the amount of traffic that is generated in short time with very little promotion, but I am also amazed at the blogs I read daily. The quality of many of them on my regular feed list is second-to-none! In fact, I can't even read the news anymore since it is all canned newswire feeds it seems. I just did this search at news.google.com [google.com] and if the link is valid for others, it shows pages and pages of the exact same article at dozens of news papers. Boring.
Do people really prefer to be preached to as a choir from people with their same opinions? If so, will tomorrow's news networks serve only a la carte instead of packaged news as previous models had?
That's something that surprises me, actually: slashdot regulars here want a la carte cable channels, a la carte news, and a la carte lifestyles, but most prefer pre-packaged politicians. If we could just change that last part to being a la carte, I'd say we'd see the best social network change.
everyone is getting tired... (Score:2)
and no, i didn't RTFA.
Reality TV / Reality Websites (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheap Plug (Score:1)
It's the Fastest Growing thing out there! OMG! (Score:3, Insightful)
Where does the traffic go? (Score:3, Funny)
Your Parents (Score:3, Funny)
Right here. (Score:1)
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.254
2 35 ms 35 ms 35 ms 82.224.5.254
3 35 ms 35 ms 35 ms nice-3k-1-a5.routers.proxad.net [213.228.12.254]
4 93 ms 39 ms 37 ms marseille-6k-1-v800.intf.routers.proxad.net [212.27.50.97]
Re:Right here. (Score:1)
Alexa Track Traffic (Score:1)