Blogger Louis Gray has been studying the referrals to his blog and has noticed that getting linked to by a large blog site or influential blogger doesn’t drive the same level of traffic as it used to. The move in traffic generation has been to the aggregators like Techmeme, Reddit, Digg etc. There is also a large shift towards readers consuming content through RSS readers rather than always coming direct to the website.

Both these trends are understandable to an extent. The sheer volume of content and the large number of blogs that are out there make it very difficult for people to easily find interesting or relevant content without the aggregators. This is a catch 22 situation. There is too much content out there for a user to filter it without taking up way too much time. The aggregator sites help with this by doing a pre-filter for us. This leads to a bit of group think though, where we only see the articles that algorithm’s have determined are the most important. RSS readers are also a way for us to deal with large amounts of information more easily

It is natural that a space that is as relatively new as blogging will evolve rapidly over time. The environment will continue to evolve as technologies grow and develop and as people throw ew ideas into the mix. I don’t think anyone can argue that we have the whole community information thing down perfectly yet. We have never individually had access to more information as a species and we need to work out exactly how to best process it.

I do not believe that the final solution is going to be the aggregators. This is not really a model that gives us the best information. It is the method that is easiest for advertising though, and since that is the prime method for revenue in the space this gives those sites the power at the moment. I would imagine that the future will be in more human edited content rather than algorithm generated content. For this method to succeed though a way to generate revenue directly from the content consumption needs to exist as advertising revenue is not large enough or stable enough to fund this.

Advertising also has a corrupting influence on editorial content. This is not necessarily in a pernicious way, but a subtle influence that this has when advertising is the only method with which a company gets its revenue. The people that give you your revenue are your real customers. If all you have is advertising then your business is to deliver people to advertisers, not to deliver a service to your “consumer”. Over time a couple of revenue generating models will emerge and then the game will change yet again.

If you have not updated in a while you may want to have a look at your templates and upgrade your installs. If you read the linked article don’t skip the comments.

This is another of many reasons why this site has remained on MovableType.

On a couple of my wordpress installs on other domains I have been negligent in updating the installs and have had issues in the past. It’s to bad that wordpress users continue to suffer from security holes in older versions. [Deep Jive Interests]

Over the past 4–5 years in writing this blog I have always been concerned about services that cause consumers of this content to get connected through a third party service.

As many of you I have signed up for most of the social networking services, for me anyways as more as a point of interest, that connects me with the family of consumers of this content, that I, and my team produce. If you read this blog on a regular basis you will know it is intermixed with Rich media containing Audio Podcast, Blog Post and Video.

While I realize their are a variety of ways and software tools that one can get to our content, down deep I hope that everyone comes here first. Geek News Central is, and always will be the primary point of presence for anything that I, and the contributing editors feel the need to post on.

With the invention of Twitter, FriendFeed, and several other services out their that is commanding a lot people’s attention. I have slowly come to realize that many people are only getting part of the ongoing  conversation, which in a sense is breaking the very thing I have tried to prevent over the past 4–5 years.

Part of it is my own fault for not making sure that the Twitter conversation and everything else I haphazardly post on is not also syndicated on this site.

I am torn though, as I am sure I could setup a widget and import, my flickr post, all my tweets etc..,  but I am also pretty positive not everyone wants to see all my tweets, after all why would you care that I am writing this post from LAX? You don’t but I did tweet I was in LAX, this trivial information has no added value to the content here, but at times I do have important things to say that could be carried here as well as being sent out on Twitter.

I think this is going to continue to be a hot topic for a while, as we all want the eyeballs here first, or people consuming the content via the primary RSS feeds, I am going to look into a way to easily get the content that is important onto and in this my primary content stream.

As a side note. This is one of the major things we took into consideration at RawVoice with our podcast publisher. We have built a great tool that does not de-centralize the conversation. [Loic Le Meur]