ReadWriteWeb

One month ago Monica Rankin posted a video to YouTube about how she uses Twitter in her classroom at the University of Texas. Somehow this Monday morning the video showed up on the page of the most popular bookmarks for the day on Delicious. It had only been viewed 425 times and neither Rankin nor we could figure out how it got bookmarked so much in that one random day. It's a very good video though, so we wrote a blog post about it that saw an unusually high 12,000 views within 24 hours. We decided to pay very close attention to where those readers came from, just to see what we could learn, and some unexpected trends emerged from the data.

We've posted below a series of charts showing how many people clicked through that article hour by hour and from where they came. It's just one blog post, but this example sheds some light on a few interesting questions people are asking about the social web.

Some ideas are either so good (or so easy to copy), that it's only a matter of time before they have been cloned so many time that they become cliché. Popurls was exactly such an idea - a simple web site that aggregates headlines from various Web 2.0 blogs and social media sites.

The latest Popurls clone is Smashbuys: a site that displays the top sellers in various categories at some of the major online retailers, including Amazon, Newegg, and iTunes.