The week before last I received a Plaxo email about John Chaffee that led to this post that was picked up by a number of people, most prominently at first by Om Malik. Being the C-list blogger that I am, I saw an incredible surge in traffic which is illustrated on the graphic on the left. I don't recall the exact number but I think I must have made at least $.50 in Google Ad Words that day.
In addition to pick up by Om, there were links from Moconews and a number of other sites. It really was quite impressive for me to watch given that my normal daily traffic is 50-100 visitors a day.
What I didn't expect was the second spike you see on this chart. Sometime on Monday Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of Live Journal linked to the post and up went the traffic again. If I were to factor out the extra pick up from Moco and others, Brad stood toe to toe with Om Malik. I personally have to say that this was not really a surprise to me, but when you think about it a bit, it is sort of amazing. These two subgroups of readers have very little overlap from what I can tell but have relatively comparable audiences in terms of size. The difference to me is that Brad's audience is spread throughout the country where Om's is more concentrated in urban areas that have strong technology links.
This all sort of takes me back to a post I wrote here about the lack of mobile coverage by the Web 2.0 press. A lot of my sentiment is less about the fact that mobile is a ghetto because 30+ years olds don't get texting but that the youth market isn't taken seriously by the technology crowd in general.
Fortunately there are some signs of increased awareness of what's going on. Robert Scoble posted this article about the secrets behind Myspace's success after chatting with the CTO of Myspace. Also Danah Boyd continues to churn out insightful pieces regarding the youth market and social networking in pieces like this one from earlier this week.
It seems to me that the awareness of the scope and size of what the "kids" are doing is starting to sink in. I have heard derisive comments about Live Journal and Xanga not being serious blogging but I think what John and Brad have built are extremely amazing and are truly a cultural phenomena not unlike what we hear that is beyond the Myspace hype and in my opinion is as much or more important than how cool the new version of Word Press is.
So Om, nothing personal, but I'd take a Brad link over yours just about any day. :-)
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