Day: March 11, 2004

I’m not one to think visually, but, like many (most?) people, I appreciate a good picture all the same. Here’s Steven Van Dyke’s take on How News Travels on the Internet. Nice picture. I’m not sure I’d call what travels on the internet ‘news’ every time, but there is an amazing meme-spread going on.

Yesterday afternoon, I met with someone I worked with back in the go-go days yesterday afternoon. He and his colleagues have started a new company, and they launched their so-called pre-alpha site a couple of weeks ago, and then sent 20 people an email. He was amazed how quickly I — and others — found out about the new site, especially when measured against how long it took their previous business to propagate back in 1998-1999. PR and marketing still matter, somewhat, but as Andrew Anker wrote two days ago “brand follows user experience.” Amen. Guess this means I’m really due for a clean-up around here…

Yes, I should have done this long, long ago.

Om Malik takes a look at the Alexa graph for the domain com.com, and comes to the mistaken assumption that News.com is having a slow year. He then posits that the decline is due to the rise of blogs.

I’m all for the rise of blogs, but the reality is that CNET News.com traffic is quite steady, and has been for quite some time (longer than the period shown in Om’s graph). The Alexa graph isn’t wrong… it’s just misleading to assume that com.com is only representing News.com. That short domain has been used for many sites at CNET Networks. Over the last few quarters, though, a few sites — most notably Download.com, the largest independent software site on the internet, I believe — have moved back to their original domain. So com.com takes a hit, but download.com goes shooting back up.

The Alexa page with the misleading graph even breaks down the com.com domain a bit more, illuminating some of the sites included. Om, you have interesting things to write, but dive a bit deeper next time. (Alexa also is only one view into the traffic world… but I agree it’s interesting, since it’s one of the few public comparisons we can all make.)