My blog-mate David Pescovitz and I were interviewed for a Sydney Morning Herald story about the Bloggies (Boing Boing was among this year's winners). A nifty infographic ran along with the story. It's based on Technorati data, and points to some of the events/memes which led to the greatest spikes in blog traffic from 2004-2005. You know something's wrong with the online world when "Kryptonite Lock Controversy" inspires roughly the same amount of posts per day as "Indian Ocean Tsunami," though there may be more to the data than meets the eye.
Link to story (subscription required, user name "boingboingdotnet" password "boingboing")
Update: On his blog, Boing Boing reader Tim Jarrett offers one possible explanation for the Kryptonite-versus-Tsunami data oddity:
I say: it's not the absolute size of the spike, it's how it relates to its surroundings. (Uh, bow chicka chicka bow bow.) Based on my experience interpreting online traffic, the metric of merit when comparing two events isn't absolute amount of traffic (posts, page views, unique users) but the delta they cause from the normal volume of activity. Look at the time period around "Kryptonite lock controversy"–the spike, while high, is part of a consistently high series of spikes that appears to run from July through shortly after the election. In other words, not dramatic, considering the overall blogosphere activity at that time.
The tsunami, on the other hand, reached the same peak of activity in the middle of a seasonal down period in blog posts–in fact, as I recall, a seasonal down period for Internet activity as a whole. In other words, it's a hell of a lot more impressive that a bunch of bloggers got off their haunches after the holidays to post about the tsunami–when they weren't inclined to blog–than that they posted in a period of otherwise high post activity.
