Alex Pooley's Blog

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Below is a chart of five web 2.0 relates sites, namely digg, delicious, flickr, techcrunch, and technorati, all finding huge growth in April 2006. What the heck happened in April 2006 to spike all these sites? Was it a natural phenomenon, maybe a conference, some complex symbiotic relationship, holidays, change in weather, or did Alexa begin to bias these sites?

(click image for a larger chart)

There’s also a common trend of losing traffic towards the end of the year. You can see the end of each plot is in decline, and the same occurred in 2005. If you took a trader’s technical analysis mind set, you might say that each site spiked at the end of the third quarter and is only falling back to it’s trend line.

The resemblance between the traffic charts of technorati and del.icio.us is unbelievable.

I wrote the previous post to this blog then sauntered over to Google Analytics to see how the statistics were looking. I flicked to the stats for scribblehere.com and holy cow, “that graph looks odd”. I took a second look and noticed that the number were a magnitude larger than usual. It turns out techcrunch ran a review of existing chat solutions and mentioned ScribbleHere because it uses OpenID. Nice!

Though I’ve still enjoyed the last six months, it has been pretty rough mentally. This sort of result makes me very happy. Hopefully it’s just the beginning.