Social Networks' Traffic Stabilizes, Facebook Nears Yahoo!

Facebook Up Slightly, MySpace and Twitter Flat to Down
Despite November being nearly half over, the monthly traffic statistics from October have just been released by Compete.com, and it looks like there are no major surprises in the social networking arena. Despite the recent improvements and continued hype, traffic to Twitter.com decreased slightly, by 2 percent, month over month, tracking at the level it saw in June of this year, and lower than the previous three months. Facebook, the #3 site overall worldwide, behind only Yahoo! and Google, climbed more than 3 percent, to almost 129 million, while MySpace stayed steady around 50 million unique visitors (15th overall).


FriendFeed and Posterous Decline - While Twine Plunges
Where one saw more movement was in the lower tiers, as FriendFeed continued its descent following the Facebook acquisition, shedding nearly 7 percent of visitors, dropping below the 700k mark, from a one-time peak above 1 million, and Posterous dropped more than 12 percent, showing just under 1.2 million visitors. Twine, which once peaked above 2 million, is now just over 120,000.


Yahoo!'s Slow Decline Comes as Facebook Rises Toward the #2 Spot
Facebook's slow but steady growth actually has them looking less in the rear view mirror, toward companies like Twitter (who scored 23 million uniques vs. Facebook's 129 million) and more at the big gun right ahead of them - Yahoo!, which continued its slow descent, dropping just over 1 percent, to 135 million unique visitors. In fact, one more month with the same trajectory would have both networks tied at about 133 million visitors, so we could see a change in placement come November.


Google's Position at #1 Remains Unchallenged (Shown With YouTube)
Unsurprisingly, Google reported in at #1, again, counting almost 150 million unique visitors in the month, according to Compete (which in my opinion is probably low). In addition, the company's YouTube subsidiary tracked just under 85 million unique visitors, good enough for the #5 position worldwide on its own. GMail continued its climb to another 9.3 million visitors, up 98% from this point last year.

Surprisingly, GMail's position is more than 3 times higher than that of Hotmail.com, which has even been surpassed by Apple's Me.com MobileMe e-mail offering. Me.com sported 3.5 million visitors, growing 98% year over year, contrasted with Hotmail's 2.5 million, which decreased 7 percent, according to Compete.


LinkedIn Stays Hot - See Versus Twitter
Interestingly, during the recession, with high unemployment, LinkedIn.com traffic increased 3.3 percent in the month to 15.5 million unique visitors, up 89% on the year. Monster.com, the massive job site, tracked in with 41.5 million unique visitors, good for #20 in the world, up 47% on the year.

Some other sites of note:

• Apple.com traffic tracked at 21.4 million, compared to 15.5 million for hp.com and 13.4 million for Dell.com.
  
• Digg.com traffic decreased less than 1 percent, up 57% on the year, good for 43 million uniques.
  
• Technorati.com traffic was flat, with only 2.8 million unique visitors.

Disclaimer: Compete statistics are known to be imperfect, but they are always interesting.

AddThis Debuts Service Directory, Statistics, Expands Sharing Network

AddThis, the sharing and bookmarking utility that lets users share interesting content from the Web to more than 150 different services, introduced a new Service Directory today, enabling any user or service provider to be submitted as a potential partner. In parallel, the company debuted a slew of statistical upgrades, highlighting the most popularly used networks, including how networks are faring across the world. For example, while Facebook is the dominant sharing service overall, including in the United States, countries including Brazil and China see more bookmarking, and South Koreans prefer to print.

According to AddThis, fully half of all shares on the service come from three options, namely: 1) Facebook (28%), 2) E-mail (14%) and 3) Adding to favorites (9%). Rounding out the top ten globally, from the last 30 days of data were 4) Print (9%), 5) MySpace (8%), 6) Twitter (8%), 7) Google (6%), 8) Digg (4%), 9) Microsoft Live (4%) and 10) Delicious (3%)


The total percentage of shares from the top ten services is a whopping 93%, leaving only 7% of all shares for the remaining 140+ services in the long, long tail. But this didn't stop a multitude of services from asking AddThis to well... add them. In a press release this morning, the company said the debut of the Service Directory was in response to a "flood of incoming requests" from "people around the world asking for their favorite sites to be added".

You can also use AddThis' Service Directory to see how specific services are more popular in one region of the world as another.


With the launch of the Service Directory, AddThis is expecting users and providers to send new bookmarking and social news platforms their way. You can check it out at http://www.addthis.com/services, which also provides a handy jumping-off point for seeing just which countries have social networking sites above utilities like printing, and just how worldwide the reach of Facebook really is.

RSS Is Doing Great, But Stand-Alone Feed Readers Are Collapsing

Three years in technology can be an eternity. I marvel that just over three years ago, I was telling you that "RSS Is a Demanding Mistress", showing off a screen capture of my NetNewswire application, powered by Newsgator. At the time, as I complained about having nearly 100 articles to read, I didn't anticipate the impact Google's entering the market with Google Reader would be, and my screenshot now seems quaint. By 2007, I had switched to Google Reader, and despite multiple assaults on Reader in the ensuing two years, you can tell most challengers apart by their epitaph.

In the past few years, I've helped champion more than a few new approaches to the RSS feed reader market, each with its own approach to making the stand-alone process more social. First there was Assetbar, who had tremendous technology, but a clunky interface, and never really got off the ground. Not too long afterward, we saw Shyftr debut, but following a highly visible controversy over shared comments on full feeds, the company eventually shut down their interesting product as well, moving instead to RSS filters. Even last week we saw NewsGator turn off their synching functionality, pointing customers to Google Reader. Yes, NetNewsWire is still around, and now points to Google Reader, but it's pretty much a legacy app at this point. (In my opinion, of course)


Isn't this cute? (From back in 2006 on NetNewsWire)
While some are debating RSS' role in a new world of real-time information discovery, there is no question that Google Reader has won this specific battle. If I exclude FriendFeed data from my own FeedBurner statistics, the combination of Google Reader and iGoogle accounts for 84 percent of all my RSS readers. In contrast, NewsGator is below 4 percent, and BlogLines checks in at just above 2 percent, with PostRank and Netvibes coming in at just over 1 percent each. Mice nuts.


My FeedBurner Stats Show Google Reader and FriendFeed Dominate
That's not to mean the RSS ecosystem is in anything resembling a freefall. The recent launches of My6sense for the iPhone, looking to find the most relevant content, and Lazyfeed for real-time blog search by topic, show me that not only is innovation alive and well, but blogs and RSS are key components in creating new products. And while Caleb Elston has been quiet of late, I am still using Toluu every day to share my OPML, and keep track of new blogs I am adding to Reader. Also, Feedly, which builds upon Google Reader with some very interesting social options, continues to plug away, gaining loyal fans.

But just think of what's happened over the last three years.

In 2006, folks like Jeremy Zawodny reported Bloglines' share at between 30 and 50 percent. Steve Rubel cited a Pheedo report showing Bloglines "slipping" from 37 percent to 30. Go back far enough, and you can see it even had the majority of the market way back in 2004, according to ReadwriteWeb.

By early 2007, Hitwise said that Bloglines had three times the market share of its nearest competitor, which was Rojo. Interestingly, that report mentioned Google Reader in passing, saying "as of the week ending 1/13/07, it had only 1/13 of the market share of visits of Bloglines." That's right. One thirteenth the share of Bloglines. I should mention that not everybody saw the gulf that wide, as others, including Bob Lee reported the two were in a practical dead heat the next month.

The last two years have been all about Google Reader, as the search leader and RSS distribution leader, through the acquisition of FeedBurner, also became the RSS consumption leader. Rojo disappeared in July of 2008, and Bloglines' own stumbles made it that much easier to switch, forcing Marshall Kirpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to say, "Do you really want Google to nail down complete dominance over the world of RSS? We sure don't."

The onetime debate about whether Google Reader is number one or not is pretty much gone, and Newsgator's turning off their online synching essentially throws in the towel. The once promising Feedeachother.com has turned off its lights. Shyftr and Assetbar aren't coming back. A new entrant called Fever is interesting, but looks more like My6sense than a traditional client. RSS is powering aggregation sites like FriendFeed, which in theory, provides 30 to 40 percent of my feed reader count, but when it comes to stand alone, all must stand in awe of Google Reader, for to do battle is futile.

TweetMeme Rolls Out RSS and E-mail Buttons, Statistics

As promised earlier this month, TweetMeme, the leading site tracking the most popular shared links on Twitter, has introduced a number of new tools that help publishers and bloggers encourage readers to distribute their stories through the popular microblogging network, all while tracking their statistics. The new tools include a FeedBurner-like chicklet that tabulates the total number of shares in the last week, and new buttons that can be embedded in your RSS feed or E-mail.


TweetMeme's New Retweet Chicklet Counter
Earlier this year, I added TweetMeme's standard "Retweet" button to posts, recognizing visitors often may want to share content they have just read with their friends on Twitter. But running standard Javascript doesn't work on RSS and E-mail, so many of my downstream readers didn't see I had done a thing. The new version operates as a standard clickable image, making this retweet functionality available to people visiting sites natively, or through Google Reader, Feedblitz or any other similar solution.


TweetMeme Tabulating Statistics By Domain On Their Site


The Four Ways You Can Integrate TweetMeme Into Your Content
TweetMeme also continues to offer a WordPress plugin for those blog authors on the platform.

In parallel with today's introductions, TweetMeme is aggressively making sure they don't undercount your sharing numbers. With today's introduction, they have added support for 11 different URL shorteners, aggregating all of these shortened URLs back to the original source and giving the author credit for the share.

TweetMeme is seeing incredible growth, having jumped on the back of the fast-accelerating Twitter at the right time, and today's introductions will no doubt further cement their role in the sharing and counting ecosystem. You can see the new chicklet in the right side of my blog, next to FeedBurner stats.

As Retweeting Rises, Linking Continues to Decline

Operating a blog focused on early adopters means being willing to adapt as technology and the world around us evolves. One of the more-recent additions to the blog was my embedding of buttons from TweetMeme, to show how often my posts were being linked to on Twitter, and making it easier for others to retweet these items, even thought I've already gone on record as not being a big fan of retweeting myself.

I made the change not because of a change in my own practices, but due to recognition that many people are turning to Twitter to share links and find new links from peers. While most of my posts only get a few dozen tweets, some have numbered over a hundred. And as this occurs, in parallel, the total number of links back to the Web site from other blogs is decreasing.

Not too long ago, one of the most common items to see featured on a blog was one's Technorati Authority, showing the number of unique blogs that linked back to you in the previous six months. Looking back at some of my "State of the Blog" entries I used to post monthly, I can see that approximately one year ago, that number stood at nearly 1,000. (See: here) Now, that same measure is only slightly above 500, a decrease of nearly half, despite my posting schedule being fairly regular, and the site's visibility rising over the same period.


Just Over a Year Ago, Technorati Had More Traffic Than Twitter...
Discussion of Technorati Authority used to be a big topic on this blog as recently as 2007. (See: Why My Technorati Ranking Is Slip-Sliding Away, Technorati Needs to Stamp Out Viral Tag Spam Now, Is Technorati Going After Spam Blogs?, and My Technorati Link Stats Make No Sense) But now, not only is Technorati largely overlooked, but so is linking, for the most part. It's easier to send a link via Twitter, or to share a post on Google Reader or FriendFeed.

This change is why in July of 2008 I said The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining, and why Steve Rubel is now saying his stats reflect the way the Web is changing. Not only are people turning to social sites instead of blogs to share links, but often, many blogs do a lot more linking to themselves than they do in linking to other sources, whether set by editorial policies, inertia, or just simplicity. Not surprisingly, we talked about that back in 2007 as well. (Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control)

TweetMeme, which started out as a secondary project by Nick Halstead and his team at Favorit, now looks like a real winner, having gained significant visibility after rebooting last July after Twitter API issues had killed the service following initial launch. The company just announced new ways to display statistics by domain, and it will now enable the ability to retweet items no matter where they are found, including on RSS feeds. Once that gets posted, you can be sure I will find a way to get that button in my RSS feed, and if done well, I will post the chicklet of domain activity alongside my FeedBurner number in the blog's sidebar.

I may still prefer to write long blog posts and link out, but I can't force everyone else to swim upstream. Retweet away.

The Changing Subscriber Definition Points to Potential Over Actual

The dust has not yet fully settled on yesterday's news that RSS feed circulation numbers around the Web spiked, thanks to a new tie-up between FeedBurner and FriendFeed that essentially counted social networking subscriptions as equal to those who signed up for your RSS feed directly. But while more and more people find their statistics up by thousands, and in some cases, orders of magnitude, the discussion has led away from what is "right" or "wrong", but instead, investigating what a real subscriber was anyway, and if we should stop thinking the way we always did.

The worlds of blogging and social networking are numbers-obsessed, and the statistics are so full of holes, most aren't even worth repeating. I may be "following" 10,000+ people on Twitter, but I rely largely on the search tool, or browse individuals' updates in Friendfeed. On FriendFeed, the story is much the same. I heavily utilize lists to categorize people I follow and make sure I don't miss the best content, but I absolutely see a small fraction of items. And don't even get me started on Facebook. Given I practically only go there to accept friend requests, play games against my family, or respond to wall comments, I certainly didn't see the photos you just posted.

The "fake follow" is absolutely in effect - even with best efforts.

But in parallel, I've treated RSS (and e-mail) differently. I believe Google Reader is the gold standard for finding information, and the link blog I produce through sharing the best items is essential for me to highlight what I find best, and for those who follow it, relying on me as a human filter. As such, while I may read quickly, and skim often, I always, always, read every story from every feed, to the tune of 100%. Similarly, I always have read every e-mail, even if I haven't made the time to respond.

But not everybody treats RSS and RSS subscriber counts with such velvet gloves as I do - which means two major things. First, total RSS subscriber counts usually far exceed total page views on most blogs, as RSS items pile up in readers around the world and go unread. Second, the religious adherence to a subscription number in RSS that I tried to have, in the face of bundling and statistics that led me astray, is easily shouted down by reason.

I used to look at subscriber counts as a good benchmark for how much influence a blog might have. A blog with 2,000 subscribers typically reaches more people than one with 200, and less than 20,000. With the addition of more horizontal social networking "followers" or "friends" in the mix, I have to look at the number as potential. For example, the new number of about 14,000 listed on my blog (up from 8,000 earlier this week and 5,000 in April) represents the maximum potential people who would see my content if everybody who subscribed to my content on RSS or FriendFeed actually kept their subscription going and active.

And it is this "potential" that is the new reality, more so than a hard and fast number you can set your watch to. But it's also a slippery slope. If we all start signing up to RSS feeds but we don't read the blogs, and we all fake follow on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and every other network out there, there's not really a whole lot of social going on - just blasting out data, friending and hoping that you're the exception rather than the rule.

To accept my new statistics, and those on other blogs impacted, the new reality requires a changed mindset. It's not saying one way is right and another is wrong, but instead, seeing the new data through the prism of our new world, where with so many information streams out there, we are all hoping that our data will catch someone's eye, not that it always will.

FriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button

It's tempting to go back the age-old line of there being lies, damn lies, and statistics. On the Web, where practically everything is measured and big numbers are almost always better, counting up one's followers, friends, subscribers or authority is practically a pasttime. But with each metric comes a question of validity - how did they approach that data, and is that process consistent with the world view of what is factual?

Today, for reasons known only to their team, FriendFeed started to display subscriber counts to those FriendFeed users who are importing blog posts alongside all other subscribers, displayed in FeedBurner or any other blog analytics tool. With this change, popular FriendFeed users have seen a dramatic jump in their feed subscriber counts, even if actual traffic or readership to their sites has not changed.


BlogPerfume Shows My Stats Spiked Today
A clear beneficiary of this move, my own statistics ballooned from a possibly accurate count of just over 8,000 subscribers on this blog to more than 13,000. And in parallel, thanks to my importing my posts on my wife's blog, her count catapulted from just over 50 to more than 9,000. (For a site that gets only dozens of visits a day)


My Wife's Blog Stats Are Through the Roof
Coincidentally, my RSS subscribers had already been jumping, starting in late April, for reasons largely unbeknownst to me. In the last two months, I organically saw the subscriber counts pass the 5,000 barrier and crest to the more than 8,000, as I poked through the stats and tried to find out why - considering both Google Reader bundles and possibly a part-time inclusion on the Techmeme leaderboard as factors. But now, pointing to that growth seems silly, given FriendFeed flipped the switch and gave me a big, albeit likely false, foundation.


FriendFeed's Impact Rivals that of Google On This Site
The company's comments on this change state that "you are putting your words in front of a lot more people", so theoretically, they should be counted. But I believe it is less-intensive to follow someone on FriendFeed than it is through standard RSS, and I have no idea how this handles duplicates, though I can guess it's somewhat controlled, given my own stats jumped by a mere 5,000 when my wife went up by more than 9,000.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek clearly made his comments understood, when he said, "Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing".

Since you don't have admin access to my FeedBurner stats, you can see the jump by taking a look at Blog Perfume's Feed Analysis tool here.

So the question is - why? Did the FriendFeed team just want to extend the visibility of how much impact their service has with bloggers? This move makes them a clear rival to Google in my own statistics. Or did they really think this was a way to show, accurately, how many people you were exposed to? Either way, as I said on a thread in the site, what's done really can't be undone. I hate upward spikes as much as I hate downward spikes, as we've seen when FeedBurner and Google FeedFetcher miss each other in the night. But it's not accurate, especially when it comes to small blogs hiding on big accounts (like with my wife's blog on my ID). I just hope Twitter, Facebook and other sites don't choose to do the same thing, or we can call the whole tracking bit a wash.

MicroBlink Releases Feedstats.info for FriendFeed Stat Fanatics

In technology, if you can measure an activity and compare it with that of other users, it's likely somebody is working on a service to crunch the numbers. Twitter has TweetStats and following counts. FeedBurner shows RSS subscribers. LinkedIn displays the number of connections. And FriendFeed displays following counts, as well as likes and comments activity, on your profile. But the service, in its latest upgrade, removed the ability to analyze your own feed and see which friends were most active on your thread. Into that void walks a new service from the team at Microblink, called Feedstats.info.

Feedstats.info essentially provides the same information that previously was available to all FriendFeed users, but not just for your own account - opening up the ability to analyze anybody's activity, so long as you know their user name.


Entering the ID into Feedstats.info

The data says I use Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed most often.
If you enter a FriendFeed user's ID into Feedstats.info, you can see how often they post per day (in the last 1,000 items), what services contributed to that feed (both in bar chart and pie chart form). You can see what days and what times of day the user most frequently uses FriendFeed, and also, who provides the most likes and comments on their items.


FeedStats Shows I Use FriendFeed Least On Weekends, and from 1 to 7 a.m.

FeedStats Also Shows Who Has Activity On My Items
Using this service, you can see which users log in to FriendFeed at specific intervals during the day, and those who are pretty much on the service around the clock, stopping only to sleep (I assume). You can also, if you check enough accounts, get a good idea as to who the most prolific people are in terms of "liking" activity, especially if they lead many different accounts.


FeedStats Takes A Look at Rochelle

Hutch Carpenter Under the Microscope
As with most stat sites, it's easy to start playing with the charts, and equally as easy to ask, "what's the point?" At what point does knowing the data is there start to impact user behavior? Should Rob Diana stop sharing so frequently on Google Reader if he finds out that it's nearly 90 percent of his feed? Should I be using Twitter more or FriendFeed less? Or the other way around?


Rob Diana: Google Reader Expert

Jesse Stay Uses Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed.
One of the assumed corollaries offered by Feedstats.info is a guess that those who like your items have a high compatibility with you, making them most "like" you. But what I found is that there is a small subset of users with a tremendous number of likes and comments, far outstripping mine, and they may lead my account as well as others, making our correlation a false one. But other than that, it's still an interesting set of data to play with. You can sign in with your FriendFeed API key, and can check any account, as I have.

Google Reader Extends Statistics On Friends' Sharing Habits

Sharing items I find interesting in Google Reader is a major part of my social activity, as I help promote discovery of quality information to those who choose to subscribe, in a way, acting as a pro bono information filter on behalf of geeks everywhere. With streams from my Google Reader shares flowing into Socialmedian, FriendFeed, Facebook and the shared item tabulators, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme, I recognize the impact a simple mouse-click can do.

Sharing these feeds means I'm not reading my news in isolation. Friends I've connected with can make comments to my items, and should I choose, I can follow others' shared link blogs as well.


My Friends' Sharing Statistics In Google Reader
Today, the Google Reader team introduced a minor update that lets you now see just how frequently you're getting items from friends, and interestingly, you can now, for the first time in my knowledge, see how many other people are subscribed to their feed (and your own). For example, I learned today that 562 people have subscribed to my Google Reader link blog. That's still more than 5,000 behind Robert Scoble, a longtime evangelist of the practice, but only three others who I follow sport more than 100 connections.

And in case I was worried I was sharing too often, with approximately 18 shares a day, one of my connections, our friend Rob Diana, from Regular Geek, is sharing a cool 51.2 items every 24 hours, while two others are closer to me, with more than 10 shares a day.

It's almost tempting to start playing with the math to see what the downstream impact is of the shares.

If Robert Diana shares 51.2 items a day to 72 people, is that about 3,686 total views added?
If Robert Scoble shares .4 items a day to 5,889 people, does that hit 2,352 total views a day?

You get the idea.

Google Reader is trying to become more social and make the RSS reader a destination, rather than a pass-through. And I like their attempts, but it's clear more could be done. I'd like to be able to view just those feeds I subscribe to, and have the option to view friends' shares later, rather than have them combined in the same feed. I'd like to have e-mail alerts available if somebody commented on my shared items feed. I'd still like to know the most popular shared items, and most popular feeds.

But they are making good headway. Which reminds me... Didn't somebody say RSS was dead?

Meta: LouisGray.com Passes 2,000 Post Mark

As I stopped providing monthly updates early last year into traffic activities and other statistics on the blog, I have not been paying as much close attention to achieving what some would call milestones. But on Saturday, with the blog post Good People, Bad Companies: The Intersection of Skill and Luck, I hit the mark of 2,000 posts on louisgray.com, since early 2006, covering a period of 3 1/3 years, essentially. Since then, we've posted 8 more times (including this one), so I am a tad tardy in marking the achievement.

Back when I did watch these things more closely, on October 11, 2007, I marked hitting the 1,000 post number, and at the time highlighted what were then my top ten things I blogged about, including: 1) Apple, iPod and iTunes, 2) Blogs, Links and RSS, 3) Google, 4) TiVo and TV, 5) The Oakland A's, 6) The Cal Bears, 7) The Sacramento Kings, 8) Nintendo Wii and Games, 9) Statistics and 10) Technology Innovators and Startups.

Amazing to think of how much things have changed (in my opinion) in just 18 months, over which I, with the help of some strong guest authors, knocked out the next 1,000 posts.

Of the 10 blogging topics I noted back in October 2007, I would say that Apple, Blogs and RSS, Google, and Technology Innovators and Startups are still core focuses, with early startups rising incredibly. But I don't talk as much about Apple and TiVo as I once did, I reduced statistics discussion, and practically eliminated sports altogether.

Now, and you tell me if I'm wrong, I believe I blog about: 1) New Web Services and Startups, 2) Social Media Tools, including Twitter and FriendFeed, 3) Blogs and RSS, 4) Online Best Practices, 5) Google and Search Competitors, 6) Apple and iTunes, 7) Business and Finance, 8) IPhone Apps and Games, 9) Information Discovery and Overload, and 10) Personal Updates.

I wish there were an easy way to point out what were posts 50, 100, 250 and 500, but for now, it's always good enough just to point out post #1 from January 9th, 2006: Macworld Expo Eve 2006. If only I knew then what was to be a little hobby would turn out to be an obsession.

FiveThirtyEight Founder Speaks On Stats, Elections and Baseball

Even as many voters sat on pins and needles, the 2008 presidential election was among the easiest to predict, according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, whose site skyrocketed to stardom amid high visibility throughout the primary and general election season last year, as he took a thorough background in statistical analysis and focused on the world of politics, hoping to improve the accuracy of polls and predictive analysis. In his comments on a keynote at the SXSW Interactive conference today, he said media outlets relied too much on most recent news, and could improve their prognoses if they instead turned to historical statistics and trend data.

Nate said he started FiveThirtyEight.com "out of frustration" with the traditional media properties, including CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. He said their coverage "wasn't empirically valid and correct," adding, "polls were too much of the narrative and they were taken too seriously as they were poorly conducted and interpreted."

Armed with a history of crunching baseball statistics to predict how well players would perform in the future from his time with the Baseball Prospectus, Nate tried to spot irregularities in polling or find variables that indicated how voters in each state were likely to trend which most pollsters were missing. One example included how in the Appalachian region, voters who declined to state their ethnicity, choosing to instead be labeled as "American", were doing so as a badge of pride, but also indicated a level of "redneckness," as he put it.

Like with baseball, Nate called the political process a long season, where largest trends were not swayed by an individual game's data, or by a single primary.

"You don't get that much information at once. A puzzle gets solved a little at a time," Nate said. "People are trained to over-react to these kinds of things, and I would urge patience."

Having successfully predicted the 2008 elections more accurately than practically anybody else out there, Nate is now being courted to try and solve a wide array of other issues, ranging from predicting the Academy Awards (which was partially successful), to predicting economics. As could be expected, he was asked to provide his thoughts on the economic slowdown that has effected everyone, and how long it would be until potential voters started to blame the Obama administration, instead of the Bush administration.

"We haven't had a situation like this in the modern era," Nate said. "People are really scared, and they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have people who are very pessimistic about the future of the country, but Obama has great approval ratings. Usually that doesn't happen. There is a kind of grace period of three to six months, and after this grace period, of about 18 months, people assign him as much blame as they would Bush for the economy, so he needs the economy to turn around sooner, rather than later."

But even armed with as much data and talent as he has, Nate recognizes that other factors are in play. Baseball players can get injured, and "you can only expect a human to do what they do what they were doing so many times," he said, adding, "in baseball, everything in the last 100 years is 99.9% accurate. The real world is not like that."

Speaking of not predicting the real world, the term FiveThirtyEight, which refers to the number of electoral votes available in a presidential election, may need to change, should Washington DC gain representation in Congress, throwing all the numbers off. Should that happen, Nate just may have to change his URL.

Where is Your Focus: Subscribers or Traffic?

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

James Duthie of Online Marketing Banter has a really valuable post on 5 important lessons that he learned from his first year of blogging. I think everyone could agree to having learned a lot of the lessons that he listed, myself included. However, his first two lessons really inspired me to think about where my focus is when it comes to my own blog. 

Lesson 1 - Momentum disappears damn quickly.

Lesson 2 - It's not all about the traffic.

With these two lessons in mind, I think that as a blogger begins to evolve they have have to make a decision: you can work overtime to keep up traffic to continuously build momentum or you can stop worrying about the traffic and shift your focus to converting the traffic that you receive into subscribers. Some people focus on both, which can be a daunting task. Getting people to visit your site in the beginning of your blogging career is no easy task, unless you have great connections.My decision was to worry more about subscribers than traffic. I figured that with enough subscribers, you can begin to have consistently decent traffic, without worrying about the momentum that disappears all to quickly for some of us.

Know Your Goals

For me, this was an easy decision because I don't display any ads on SheGeeks, nor do I care to. Though recently I've been dabbling in sponsored links. Being aware of what you plan to do with your site can help you better understand what decision would be best for you. The answer to the aforementioned question is all so dependent upon the focus of your site and what you are attempting to achieve. I want more conversation. With more subscribers I can easily generate more conversation. This is easier for me rather than trying to generate conversation by trying to increase my traffic. And no, high subscribers doesn't necessarily mean high traffic, especially if your content is few and far in between.

Know Your Audience

On another note, I'm aware that the majority of my readers user RSS feeds to access the site. I'm also aware that the majority of my readers are probably "skimmers", meaning they don't read everything in its entirety unless it's truly worth their time. So traffic is just a moot point for me the majority of the time. What does this mean? Be aware of your audience and the tools they use. To me, the aforementioned facts reeks of a low click-through rate. So really, why bother?

What's Your Focus?

Which leads me to ask the rest of you: where is your focus when it comes to your blog: subscribers or traffic?

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Three And Out Takes Third Fantasy Football Trophy. Shrug.

As the Super Bowl wrapped up the year's NFL season, so to ended the year's fantasy football season - which on some days seems dramatically more important. And, now that the dust has cleared, my team has finished 1st overall, just like it did the last time I played, in the 2005-06 season, and the 2001-02 season, my rookie year. And while I should be elated, given my push to be competitive, and love of sports and all things statistical, ending up the winner is met more with a shrug than jubilation - partly because of the knowledge the competition is complete, with no more weekly battles, and also, as the margin of victory was already guaranteed, making today's game moot.

As I mentioned back on January 4th (See: Geek Leading Fantasy Football League During Playoff Push), I managed to take a lead after the 1st week of the playoffs, and knew I was well-positioned going into week two, but surprisingly, a lot of little things went right for my squad, and badly for everyone else - so while there were many upsets each weekend, the only real surprise in our league was that I managed to not only keep the lead - but score highest every single Sunday, increasing my lead.


By the time the Pittsburgh Steelers were crowned NFL champions this evening, I had finished the four-week playoff round with a total of 391 points, almost twice that of the second-place finisher, who had 217 points, followed by the stragglers at 190 points and 101. To give you an idea of how wild it is that I scored so many points, just three years ago I won it all with 281 points, beating out the second place team, who scored 239, and the prior year, I had finished second, losing 290 to 265 - much closer contests than the 2008-09 playoffs. (See: Kiss of Death League: History)

So how did this happen? As with any good fantasy squad, significant luck was involved. I had expected the Carolina Panthers to do very well, and possibly contend for the Super Bowl title. But as we were drafting one Saturday morning, I wanted to make sure I didn't post a zero in the initial Wild Card contests, and loaded up on the high-offense Arizona Cardinals, getting the quarterback and wide receiver pair of Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, as well as the San Diego Chargers' Darren Sproles, who I expected to rack up points returning kickoffs against what was supposed to be a superior Colts squad. But then Sproles became the primary running back as Ladanian Tomlinson was injured, and the Chargers beat the Colts. And virtually everyone knows what happened to Arizona. They went all the way to the Super Bowl, and both Warner and Fitzgerald set records along the way. It almost didn't seem fair as my team excelled while others were virtually eliminated by week one.


I'm torn because I love the fact I blew out the field. But I also would have liked some better competition, and to have been watching Sunday's Super Bowl with the knowledge my fantasy season could also be on the line. I love that I won by such big margins because I'm going to enjoy going through the stats, but it isn't exactly fun to talk trash (a major part of fantasy football) when you're ahead by 100 points, so for the last month, that piece has practically been eliminated.

How much did loading up on Arizona help me? According to the league statistics, Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner were the 1st and 2nd highest scorers, garnering me 180 points between them. Add in the 44 points from Arizona special teams, and I'd be at 224, already ahead of the second-place finisher, and that doesn't even take into consideration the 74 points picked up by Sproles, who had an amazing first two weeks.

So now it's all done. At some point, I'll probably get a PayPal notification rewarding me about $200 or so, which is nice, but not life-changing. The first thing I'll likely do? Go out and see if I have to buy my own trophy to match the other two on my bookshelf. What's the fun in winning three times if you can't show everyone?

Watch for the Telephone Game in Your Short Attention Span World

One of the recurring themes on this blog has been how to handle a seeming overflow of information. We've discussed creating a social media consumption workflow. I addressed a new concept I called continuous parallel attention. I said how you handle the information overload Is up to you and later said there is no social media overload and cautioned bloggers to relax, because nobody is keeping score. But we still see problems crop up when a story gets passed from person to person and details get lost. It's the modern equivalent of the popular "Telephone" game we all played as kids, where the last phrase was never close to how it started.

Take a look at an example from this weekend, after Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote a piece saying FriendFeed had seen site growth that reached almost 1 million visitors in December of 2008.

Seems straight forward enough. The data came from Comscore, which shows a higher growth rate for FriendFeed than do other services, including Quantcast and Compete.com. Compete reports 700,000 visitors or so to FriendFeed in December, by the way.

But then, Robert Scoble, a good friend, good blogger, and fellow FriendFeed user relayed the story a little differently, saying that the report said FriendFeed had surpassed a million user accounts.

Using that as the baseline, Robert stated the 26,000 or so subscribers to his feed represented one of every 39 users. (See the FriendFeed thread here) But that only exacerbated the flub. Having used the site myself for quite some time, I'd be shocked if there were more than a million registered accounts, and FFHolic estimates the number to be closer to 200,000 total accounts, one fifth of a million. This of course makes Robert's penetration even higher, as that means one of every eight users follows him, but that's not the major issue.

If you're FriendFeed, and you know your actual user count, you can't exactly issue a correction saying that you "only" have a quarter million users. And if they did announce such data, which they don't, it might seem to be a letdown now that the higher, incorrect number has been released.

The service is now becoming a destination site as users share links on Twitter, their blogs, Facebook and elsewhere, so it's no surprise that the unique visitor count is higher than the number of users. After all, if I visit from home and on my wife's laptop and the office, doesn't that count as three unique visitors?

This is but one example, and I know practically all of us have made the mistake of reading stories too quickly, or coming to conclusions and extrapolations based on only partial data. For example, Stowe Boyd wrote a great piece tonight saying I was "Wrong About Twitter Funding", but he had only seen one of the two posts, which had taken point/counterpoint positions. That's not a victim of the telephone game, but he is a busy guy, like the rest of us, and no doubt overlooked one of the items.

When we're reacting to other items, or relaying them, we should be careful that we're not making new stories based on data that's not true. We're all going fast, and maybe reading a ton of RSS feeds, seeing thousands of Twitter updates, and rushing in an effort to post quickly. But there's something to be said for watching for the telephone game.

What Do You Do When Google Says You're a Zero?

Google's impact on a Web site owner is tremendous. The ubiquitous search engine can deliver anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of a Web site or blog's traffic, and in some cases, has been shown to provide upwards of 90% of all traffic from search engines. Given this, it's no wonder the industry of trying to be at the top of Google's results through search engine optimization is big business - and even though Google's efforts are fairly transparent, they have to be mysterious enough so they can't be directly gamed, and consequences are direct and dramatic. But sometimes, the decisions seem odd enough that it can't be anything but a mistake.


Google Drives Significant Traffic to Most Sites
You have no doubt seen the posts, the articles, the tweets, the e-mails, and all matter of comment spam around increasing your rank on search engines, and "getting to the top". You might also see people eagerly await tweaks to Google's PageRank, an algorithm that gives weight to a site based on its relationship on the Web to other linked sites, and their own perceived rank. Theoretically, it is assumed that the higher your PageRank is, the more likely you are to be higher in search results (based on a 0 to 10 scale). As one's rank is pushed upwards, you can expect to see more traffic on Google, and if you're demoted, you can expect it to similarly drop.

But what if you find your site dropped down to zero?

No doubt the feeling can be one of disbelief and powerlessness. I was surprised this morning to learn that the excellent blog "The Future Buzz" had seen its PageRank knocked down to zero, and while I can't say I watch PageRank that closely, or knew what it was before, I don't think that' move makes any sense. Adam Singer, the author of the blog, and a great electronic musician, by the way, has been running the site since November of 2007, and has grown his RSS subscriber base beyond 500, myself included.


The Future Buzz's Page Rank Evaporated...
So what can he do? I think our typical response is to cry out to Matt Cutts and hope that he can swoop in like the white knight to save the day. But as you can guess, Google is very big, Matt is very busy, and that sort of thing won't scale.

I find the situation similar to the issue we discussed last year, when Dan Morrill of TechWag found his site blacklisted by Google, thanks to what was believed to be a rogue script. One person's power in the face of the Google monolith can seem futile. No doubt Adam is going through the proper channels to learn what he did wrong, or why the site's PageRank changed, but for now it's a mystery. I've been lucky so far that Google and I get along okay. I'll just try not to tick off the pigeons who run the whole thing.

The StatBot Crunches My Google Reader Link Blog

Following last week's discussion around 10 ways you can maximize your Google Reader Link Blog, Yuvi from The Statbot went to work and pointed his super-geeky analytical skills at my own link blog, which I've been filling with shares for the better part of two years. Given I can only look at my Google Reader trends over the last 30 days, his data has brought a lot of insight.

You can see the full leaderboard for the last 10,000 shares embedded here via Zoho:



Excluding the fact I often share my own items (not a big surprise), an interesting mix of sources emerges. Yes, you see TechCrunch, Inquisitr, ReadWriteWeb and other A-List blogs leading the top 10, largely due to their prolific publishing schedules, and ability to attract tips from developers early in the process and time to chase down rumors. But below the top 10, there is a heavy mix of personal blogs, from Hutch Carpenter, to Jesse Stay, Chris Brogan, Rob Diana, David Risley and Mike Fruchter, who all place in the top 25.

In the 25-50 tier, you see John Furrier, Mona Nomura, Kara Swisher, Kyle Lacy, and Sarah Perez, mixed in with company blogs like those from Socialmedian.

In all, 379 different sources are represented in the last 5,000 shares, and 577 in the last 10,000... which shows a fairly diverse data set.

What I like about this data is that it is personal and it is natural - something that organically has developed over time based on my own interests - and is not intentionally manipulated. Yuvi also ran the data on Robert Scoble's leaderboard this week, which you should check out.

If you're not reading the Google Reader linkblog, you can find it here.

Can One's Subscription Trends Indicate Services' Momentum?

As I've mentioned several times before, I border on pack rat behavior when it comes to my e-mail. I very rarely tend to throw anything away - unless it's clearly spam or advertising from someone I don't know. For whatever reason, I save Twitter direct messages. I save responses to statuses on Facebook. I save receipts from iTunes purchases. And I definitely save e-mail confirmations from services that tell me when somebody has started to follow me online - whether that be on Facebook, Socialmedian, Twitter, FriendFeed, Strands, Disqus, or practically any one of the services I use with regularity. With an extremely active 2008 final and in the books, I thought I'd dust off my nerd-approved calculator and see what the trends looked like. If you're willing to say that a single data point indicates a trend, I found the results very interesting.

For the purpose of this navel inspection, I tracked four numbers, including new subscribers to my RSS feed, to Twitter, FriendFeed, and halfway through the year, Socialmedian. It was FriendFeed, Twitter and Socialmedian that saw the most activity for me in 2008, and cognitively, I thought I could sense when one service was spiking and another plateauing.

See the below graph:

RSS Data via BlogPerfume. Some dates to note: 1) I was a FriendFeed user prior to 2008. 2) I joined Twitter mid-way through January of 2008. 3) Socialmedian introduced the "Newsmaker" feature in mid-July of 2008.

At the end of 2007, I had approximately 200 RSS subscribers, and by the end of 2008, that number was approaching 4,000. Interestingly, the 4,000 to 5,000 number is close enough to the number of followers I ended up with on both Twitter and FriendFeed by the end of 2008, with an undoubted extremely high amount of overlap. But while the services are around the same number now, how they got there tells an interesting story.

Early 2008 was relatively quiet in social media. While MG Siegler and I had joined FriendFeed, and were cajoling others to join it, in beta, the service was lightly used prior to its opening to the public. At the same time, I was enjoying writing about newcomers to the Web, like Assetbar and ReadBurner, and, for the first time, gained notice from some strong Web junkies who helped the site gain visibility and RSS subscribers.

I joined Twitter somewhat reluctantly in January, and its growth was good,but relatively small when compared with FriendFeed's boom, especially from March to May as the service exploded onto the tech scene - including more than 1,000 subscribers in May alone. But as is common with many products, FriendFeed's initial spike settled down into a consistent level after the launch, dropping to a third of its peak, below 400 each month from August to October.

At the same time, Twitter's problems with uptime were reducing my use of the site, and others as well. I saw new followers of less than half April by June, before Twitter too settled in at a level almost equal that of FriendFeed.

In July, Socialmedian added a Newsmaker feature, which saw anywhere from 100 to 300 new followers through the end of the year, not quite the level of Twitter of FriendFeed, but respectable.

After a stable Fall, November and December saw a resurgence across all metrics, likely the result of more posts on louisgray.com, as I added additional writers and expanded the posts' reach. But while FriendFeed's climb was gradual, Twitter has exploded - delivering more than 1,300 new followers in December after almost 700 in November, and January 2009 is on track for even more.

Oh! And I barely mentioned RSS. While my aggregate number was much higher by the end of 2008 than the end of 2007, you can see much of the momentum I had was gained in the first half of this year. It could have been due to their being a limited number of tech geeks in the echo chamber. It could have been due to a higher profile on Techmeme, which decreased significantly in the second half. And it's always possible I overweighted social media versus the blog in the second half of the year once the twins were born. Not sure. But what I do know is that with the broader team in place, we are reaching new people, so if I couldn't get any bigger on my own, now I've got help.

So, navel gazing aside... does this show that FriendFeed's spike and then reduced profile is set to grow further again, as the trend from October shows? Is Twitter breaking into the mainstream, as November and December suggest? And will Socialmedian ever trump either of those two? Are you nuts enough to keep all this data like I have, and have you seen the same trends?

Quantcast Shows Which Services Rely Most on Their "Addicts"

If you're like me, you have a list of sites you visit just about every day, without fail, and some may even be visited multiple times a day. Whether you're a frequent visitor of Google News, CNN.com, Facebook or Twitter, site and service owners know they can count on some consistent traffic from their regular visitors, in addition to natural traffic from external links or search engines. Web traffic measurement company Quantcast tracks much of this data, and has even gone so far as to categorize the most frequent visitors to some sites as "addicts", defined as those who visit a site more than 30 times in a single month - the "hardcore segment of a site's audience". As it turns out, some popular Web services rely on these so-called "addicts" for more than a third of their total traffic, and at major social networks, that number is as high as two-thirds of all visits.


Quantcast Defines Addicts as 30 or More Visits a Month
While Quantcast isn't as well-known as its competitors, including Compete.com and Alexa, it is making an attempt to track site and service's traffic, giving significant demographic information for sites, and helping advertisers try and find a perfect match. While the service doesn't claim to have sufficient visitor detail for all sites, many of the largest are now being directly tracked, meaning the data is extremely accurate.

This means that Quantcast isn't simply returning a site's total visits in a given timeframe, as well as whether traffic is increasing or decreasing, but what its users look like, and if they're addicts, regulars, or just passing through.

Some notable data shows:


FriendFeed Trails Twitter In Less-Addicted Regular Users
Twitter.com: 1% of all users are addicts, who drive upwards of 34% of total site traffic. An additional 25% of users are regulars, who deliver 40% of site traffic, meaning that the remaining 26% of traffic comes from the 74% of users who are merely passing by.

FriendFeed.com: Less than 1% of all users are addicts, who deliver 25% of all total site traffic. An additional 4% of users are regulars, who deliver 8% of site traffic. Fully 96% of users are seen as just passing by, accounting for 67% of visits.

This data tells me that FriendFeed has a real problem in converting casual visitors and making them regulars. You are either one of the "addicted", or you're probably not using the site at all. There's practically no middle ground. Twitter also clearly has its addicts, but it also has a healthy middle base of users who check in less regularly.


Facebook and MySpace Primarily Cater to Their Addicted Base
Facebook.com: 11% of all users are addicts, who drive 62% of all site traffic. A robust 53% of users are regular visitors, who give 34% of visits, and the remaining 36% of passers-by only deliver 4% of traffic.

MySpace.com: 20% of the users are addicts, providing 74% of all site traffic. Another 58% are regulars, giving 24% of visits, while the 22% of passers-by are only giving 2% of traffic.

That "addicted" users of Facebook and MySpace provide greater than two-thirds of page views is no surprise. Instead of being engaged on the "real Internet", many users log in to their walled gardens and stay there for some time. And there's not much benefit to being a passer-by for either service, so that doesn't deliver much traffic at all.

Outside of the social networking and lifestreaming spaces, you can look up virtually any Web site and see how much they rely on addicts, provided Quantcast has the data. Quantcast says only 9% of eBay users are addicted, giving 61% of visits. 16% of DrudgeReport visitors are addicted, providing 78% of visits. 2% of LinkedIn users are addicted, giving 36% of visits.

There's practically a catch-22 in business when it comes to appeasing your addicts. Lose your most ardent users, and you could find them to be your most vocal detractors, as they feel looked over and spurned. But if you appeal too much to your most addicted users, you could overlook some major gaps in your product that prevent it crossing over to the mainstream. How can you convert those casual passers-by into regular users or even addicts? Therein lies the struggle of growth. Quantcast gives us a glimpse into how many sites are faring in this battle. The question is, can the data change behavior?

Twitter Followers Spiking As Service Increases Momentum

This holiday season, there's a little something in just about everyone's stockings, it seems. A buttload of Twitter followers. Whether it's due to the microblogging service's increasing visibility, its adoption by some famous users, or new utilities like Mr. Tweet that recommend new followers, it looks like users are seeing an ever-increasing number of followers per day - in the hundreds per day for the most visible accounts, and rates approximately 3-10 times the average growth for many smaller accounts, as tracked by Twitter statistics site, TwitterCounter.

TwitterCounter is a simple service that tabulates your number of followers, and shows how that number has changed over the last 7 days, but more revealing is the site's details box, which shows how many followers the user had when first tracked, their average growth, and how many they had in the last 24 hours. In almost every single case, of those I checked, from household name A-listers to random followers I see on the site, statistics are up, way up. And the rate has only been increasing over the last seven days.

Steve Rubel, a week or so ago, noticed the spike, saying, “Twitter is on fire. I am adding 200 followers per day.” A member of TwitterCounter for almost six months, Rubel has added about 33 followers per day, but has seen activity on his feed accelerate. According to his stats page, he has added nearly 500 followers in the last week, including almost 100 yesterday. And his growth is not alone.

For example, my own data had about 13 followers per day opting in to my feed, according to the last six months worth of information at TwitterCounter. But in the last week, I too have spiked up, adding more than 300, including almost 80 yesterday, and 70 the previous day, well ahead of normal. It's made the confirmations that fill up my e-mail each morning to be pretty close to overwhelming.

In May, I wrote that Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail. But with a continued explosion of services, and so many of them getting even greater adoption rates, the percentage of automated notes is driving ever higher - Twitter being the most notable. So while I get my daily updates from FriendFeed, BlogRize, Strands, Socialmedian, Facebook and all the other networks, it's Twitter that is booming and driving the highest aggregate activity.


Take a look at how some others are seeing similar spikes in Twitter following activity:

Duncan Riley: Average Growth: 7 Yesterday: 43 Weekly: 99


Robert Scoble: Average Growth: 97 Yesterday: 224 Weekly: 1,339


Gabe Rivera: Average Growth: 7 Yesterday: 77 Weekly: 250


Jesse Stay: Average Growth: 16 Yesterday: 78 Weekly: 519


Guy Kawasaki: Average Growth: 127 Yesterday: 353 Weekly: 2,593


Steve Rubel: Average Growth: 33 Yesterday: 94 Weekly: 452


All statistics and images are via TwitterCounter.com
As mentioned, this rise could be due to many things. Maybe people are growing increasingly comfortable with following a higher number of Twitter users. Maybe this is due to automation and matching utilities. Could be a combination of all these things. But I would be willing to bet that Twitter is stepping on the gas in terms of going viral. With the service's troubling summer and downtime issues largely behind it, users are finding it's safe again and inviting others to come join the real-time blabberfest.

Are you seeing a spike in your in box as well or is this a false positive? What do you think is driving the surge?

Sarah Palin Dominates Google's Year-End Zeitgeist

Google's annual year-end zeitgeist gives us a picture of what the United States, and the world at large, was searching for in the past 12 months. This year, Google, in a first for the global search engine, broke out their search results among 30 separate countries, but here at home, there was one individual who clearly had people looking for more: McCain's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Palin's plucking from relative obscurity and continued oddities throughout the campaign following the Republican National Convention kept her atop Google's lists in almost every category. Even her being an attractive woman, to many, kept her atop the image search zeitgeist, a claim that none of her counterparts could manage.

The 2008 results (found here) show "palin" as the #7 overall fastest rising term in the US, "Sarah palin" as the #1 fastest rising term in Google News domestically, and also #1 fastest rising in Image Search. You would think that with all that searching, the GOP would have vetted her a bit more before the election, but that of course is a different story.


In fact, in a year when we had the 2008 Beijing olympics, the election of Barack Obama, a financial crisis, and a stock market meltdown, Mrs. Palin was the fastest rising in all the world. (See the global results)

Following Palin's selection as VP candidate just prior to the Republican convention, searches for her outweighted those for Obama, her running mate, McCain, and Joe Biden, the opposing VP candidate. In fact, it wasn't until October when the eventual presidential pick overtook her on the site. (See the politics page)

Outside of politics, Google shows also that Facebook outpulled MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and LinkedIn in terms of social networking interest, and that hybrid car interest peaked when gas was $4 a gallon, and fell by fall as prices dropped by half. (See: Trendsetters)

The full report is here.