Twitter increases TechCrunch web traffic

There is a new trend in social media. Tweets, messages posted on Twitter, may soon replace RSS feeds as a major source of web traffic. TechCrunch recently released its web traffic statistics. Excluding direct hits, after Google, Twitter is the number two source of referral site that drives visitors TechCrunch. I'm very surprised!

Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch

1. Google: 32.7%
2. Direct: 22.7%
3. Twitter: 9.7%
4. Digg: 7.4%
5. Techmeme: 2.4%
6. Other: 25.1%

According the author, TechCrunch tweets (messages that contain web links to TechCrunch articles) are becoming valuable link currency for the site. In the past, people follow news through RSS feeds. Today people follow news through Twitter.

Personally I haven't given up Google Reader as the tool for reading news on the web, and I only use Twitter infrequently to catch up real-time event updates. Maybe one day I will switch to Twitter for reading news when more effective tools were developed for this purpose.

The Good Deeds of Blog Aggregators

According to Jeff Thurston, there are at least five different types of blog web sites:

1. Commercial Blogs: written with a financial view - sensitive to causing maximum financial return and oriented toward causing a stir to attract readers. Blogging for financial gain alone is different than blogging as a columnist, for example.


2. News Blogs: Basically scanning the news and re-writing what already exists. Original content is low. Regurgitated content is high.


3. Original Content Blogs: Strives for original content, links to existing content in exceptional circumstances to support original content. Opinionated. Perceptive.


4. Advert Blog: Sharply written to look like a blog but serving as advertisement. Usually easy to pinpoint over time.


5. Blog Aggregators: This is a special group, [which captures the blogs of a particular community or a specific topic].

Blog aggregators are great because they save me a lot of time on discovering new blogs. They also produce aggregated RSS feeds of all the blogs that I want to read.

Two blog aggregator sites that I monitor closely:

• Planet RDF -- blogs that talk about RDF, OWL and the Semantic Web


• Planet Geospatial -- blogs written by GIS Professionals and Hobbyists

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog is a blog that combinds the two (sort of) ... :-)