Social bookmarking and traffic

Social bookmarking is when people on the net use some service to keep their personal collection of links and share them with others. Users can also take other people’s links and add them to their own, or subscribe to other people’s lists.

This kind of service started with del.icio.us. It gave birth to a new term, folksonomy, a blend of folk (of the people, popular) and taxonomy. What happens is that in social bookmarking services you can categorize entries using labels, or tags. These tags build up taxonomies that let you classify topics based on the popularity they reach in these services.

If you visit the Tags section of Technorati you can see one of the most complete folksonomies in existence, covering the blogosphere.

One social bookmarking service that’s getting quite popular is Digg.com. Aimed mainly at technology topics, it’s a good source for seeing what’s popular in tech. In this case, the stories on the front page are the most popular ones, which is defined by voting (digging) on each link posted to the system. For example, my piece on the Singularity operating system spent a couple of days on the front page and got a decent score of 888 diggs; it’s currently on page 5 of the software section.

The interesting thing about Digg.com is that it’s a mix between a pure bookmarking service like del.icio.us and a tech news site like Slashdot.

Slashdot is a site aimed at the most techie crowd, especially Linux fanatics. It’s like a news site fed by its users: you can submit a story, and a group of moderators, some volunteers and some not so much, like the famous CmdrTaco, review it and publish it if they find it interesting. The site is fairly controversial; I suggest reading the Wikipedia article about it. The Singularity piece also got published on Slashdot, and I mention it because I’m going to use it as the example for the next section.

Traffic analysis

All of us who have a blog want as many people as possible to read us, to build our audience (the wrong word for these times, but I can’t think of another). Traffic is one thing, and audience is another, which measures the level of “loyalty” of your readers. The statistics tools out there focus mainly on 3 parameters: pageviews, unique sites and visits. There are other parameters such as bandwidth, hits and files, but they’re more technical and are useful to developers, and for optimizing the site.

Let’s focus on the 3 parameters mentioned. A visit is a browser interacting with your site over a period of time; we could call it a session, but that term has a different technical meaning. A distinct address corresponds to an IP number of the visitor’s connection; you may get several visits from the same IP, which happens, for example, if a lot of people visit you from one company. Finally, pageviews are the number of pages “delivered” by the server to each user.

I’m interested in measuring traffic in terms of visits, and secondly in the average number of pageviews per visit (pageviews/visits). For example, the Singularity piece was posted the same day on Digg.com and on Slashdot. The referral through Digg generated traffic of about 1,600 visits; the referral through Slashdot generated over 35,000, as you can see in the chart. The average number of visits to Darkside is about 947, leaving out the special case of the Singularity piece. Pageviews per visit come to 1.77 with a standard deviation of 0.357; in this case, if we take out that explosion of visits, the number doesn’t change much (exercise: why does this happen?). I’m attaching a chart with that parameter per day. Notice that the peak in pageviews per visit coincides with the spike in visits. The reason is that many visitors want to see whether you have anything else interesting to show on your blog, so they explore it more.

The question is how you keep your audience captive. If you land a hit like that one, the anxiety of wanting to outdo yourself kicks in. The truth is you have to relax, because for the effect to repeat itself your site has to become relevant, and the only thing you can do about that is write a good piece. Someone will notice it, post it on some social bookmarking site, and you may get another one of those traffic explosions.

One piece of advice people give, and a very wise one, is to answer the comments your readers leave. That is highly valued. It’s even good not to censor opposing opinions, as long as they aren’t offensive and they meet whatever criteria you define.