Where the Online Traffic is Going

vitaly.friedman writes "While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information. The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year."

Alexa

[eldavojohn]

You don't need a research paper to tell you where the traffic is going.

Check out Alexa's Society Category [alexa.com]. It's rife with the named blogging machines and even Slashdot!

All the report provides is the sheer visiting numbers and the rate of increase over the past year. And give proof that Tom [myspace.com] over at MySpace is laughing all the way to the bank. You may call me a karma whore but that man has 68475709 friends!

Traffic is going Grassroots

[digitaldc]

People want more specific information about their various interests. No longer do they just surf the web for stories that corporate entities write, they want to hear from REAL people and REAL opinions.
People are tired of being force-fed information that they may or may not deem useful and have no way of responding to that information.
Blogs and related ventures will be much more popular than corporate-only websites, and that is a good thing indeed.

FreeCycle: Localized & Efficient

[rewinn]

Freecycle [freecycle.org] lets you give or get free stuff in your community with minimal effort.

It's very important that each Freecycle node is geographically localized, e.g. one city, so that you're offering/accepting only to/from people for whom the offer is geographically practical. For this application, the internet does not annihilate geography, it only minimizes other transaction costs of offering/accepting free stuff ... but that's plenty of benefit!

Example: Seattle-area uses [yahoo.com]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycleseattle/ [yahoo.com]