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.

Here's how it went down. I was scanning RSS feeds Monday morning and discovered Rankin's video in the feed for Delicious Popular. I assumed that one of our competitors had written about it already, but in looking around I couldn't find anyone at all who had. I sat on it for hours, unfortunately writing another post about Twitter and one from a news tip I got via Twitter (is there anything else to write about these days?).

At 3 PM PST I wrote up the post about Rankin's class. I embedded her video and added more examples of Twitter in classrooms and related resources discovered on Delicious. I visited delicious.com/tag/twitter+classroom, opened up several pages worth of recent bookmarks using the Autopagerize Greasemonkey Script, then sorted all the bookmarks visible by number of saves using the Delicious Sort Visible Links script. That made it easy to find high quality related links to include in the post.

The post could have been much better written than it was, but it did much, much better than I expected it to. It was also an exception to the rule gleaned from a much larger aggregate study we wrote about last year finding that 4 PM PST on a Monday is one of the worst times to put up a blog post if you want it to get social media traction.

At 4 PM I put up the post and Tweeted out the link. 500 people clicked through and read it in the first hour, mostly from Twitter but some from Google Reader.

Note that Twitter desktop clients, a thousand random URL shorteners and other factors lead to a major under-counting of actual traffic from Twitter. Imagine the Twitter line below bumped up but trends remaining the same.

Traffic slowed a bit, then the post made it to the bottom of Delicious Popular after three hours. From there it hit aggregator site PopURLs, the secret winner in all these numbers. Traffic stayed strong throughought the night (West Coast night, that is) except for a short dip at 3 AM. Then the East Coast of the US started waking up and people started sharing and bookmarking the post again.

The link moved from Delicious Popular to the much more popular outright front page of Delicious.com at 9 AM PST, leaving PopURLs in the dust for a few hours. A steady trickle of visitors kept coming in that morning from Facebook.

Suddenly, perhaps because it was lunch time (noon) on the West Coast and 3 PM near or at the end of school on the East Coast, a flood of people started coming in from Twitter and elsewhere. It was 20 hours after we wrote, published and Tweeted about the article ourselves. I sat down to lunch with an iPhone developer thinking the post had lived out its short-term life at several thousand views, only to come out of lunch to discover a huge spike in readers.

Twitter search and archives are such a mess that it's probably impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened at noon, but it may have been that people got some free time, found the link on the front page of Delicious and then Twittered it out to friends. It's also possible that Delicious and Twitter users are different but overlapping groups and there's some other explanation for the Twitter spike. Google Reader click-throughs were at a day-long high at the same time.

As fast as the influx of traffic came, it was gone again. Within two hours all the sources of traffic had fallen back to their half-day lows, except for the slowly growing Facebook referrals.

Note the "other" category above includes small contributors like FriendFeed, JimmyR.com and OurSignal - but it also includes a whole lot of Twitter desktop clients and other hard-to-track sources.

A Few Take Aways

I've spent some time throughout the day looking at this data and have thought of the following:

Obviously PopURLs is not to be forgotten. It's old school, not exclusively focused on tech but clearly remains a popular place to find content.

Twitter is clearly becoming a major traffic driver, though this was a post about Twitter. It's very interesting that the spike in Twitter traffic came almost a full day after the first wave of Tweets about this article. Something else kicked it off, it's hard to say what.

ReadWriteWeb should probably be developing a bigger presence on Facebook. It's much bigger than all of these other sites but just barely made the chart for traffic. It stayed steady throughout the 24 hour period, though.

This wasn't the kind of post that was going to do well on Digg or Hacker News but those aren't the only games in town. I thought it might do well on StumbleUpon but it hasn't yet.

There's an interesting rhythm in that chart of traffic by sources, isn't there? What other patterns of interest do you see?

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Sean Ammirati, Doug Coleman Dana Oshiro, Steven Walling and Lidija Davis.

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.

Smashbuys' business model seems quite simple: affiliate marketing. While Smashbuys doesn't seem to disclose this anywhere on the site, every link to the sellers' sites has an affiliate code in it.

Overall, Smashbuys puts an interesting spin on the Popurls model. The top 10 lists will probably work best for for books, music, and movie tickets, but I'm not sure how many people make their electronics buying decisions this way.

The general PopURLs service is remarkably feature rich. Users can hover over items for a preview of the feeds from a long list of social news and media sites. There's a mobile site and many other platforms, from the Wii to Facebook.

Customization is limited but the PopURLs sites aren't intended to serve as your entire feed reader. Marban says the site compliments his full reader, he just checks in on PopURLs to see top stories throughout the day. I use Netvibes similarly because customization is important to me. I'm probably not the intended audience for any of these sites, but I sure do admire what Marban is doing. This 2006 interview with him from Folksonomy.org is a fun read.

The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you'll find links to Intel white papers and blogs. Intel is advertising the site heavily, which is interesting as it appears to be an ad campaign itself.

I'm not sure how many people in the enterprise world will find the service truly useful over time - the ability to add at least one or two other feeds from your own personal life seems pretty important. None the less, the campaign is an interesting one that could serve as a model for social media advertising in the future. It's also nice to see the PopURLs project progressing so well still.

Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.

There have been varying reactions to Alltop. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch wrote that Alltop is "just a big pile of nothing." I think he was referring to the fact that it is relatively easy to create an app like Alltop - and he referenced the Web 2.0 Workgroup homepage (developed by Fred Oliveira a few years ago) as an example. Others think that Alltop is filling a need, for mainstream people to get into the RSS reading scene. Mick Liubinskas wrote that "I can see my wife and even my dad using it." Mick said that "they are now both looking for stuff to read and are ready to venture outside of the news sits they know, but they are not quite sure where to start."

Chris Shipley of GuideWireGroup came to a similar conclusion to Mick, noting also that the sourcing of material is an important part of Alltop. Chris said that Alltop is "a collection of the stuff that top bloggers, Twitterers, and social media buffs like to read. It’s not the wisdom of crowds, so much as the wisdom of the most engaged social media advocates." I agree with Chris that the content selection on Alltop is smart and savvy - these are quality blogs. Certainly Alltop has a much broader set of sources than its inspiration, PopURLs (a collection of popular, but slightly cliched by now, blog and social media sources).

I like Alltop. It is a simple app, so I think Mike Arrington had a valid point there. But it's effective and it is definitely an easy scan for people looking for social news to read. It won't satisfy many early adopter types, who will continue to use the likes of Google Reader and Newsgator for 'heavy lifting' of RSS feeds. And early adopters will continue to use the likes of Netvibes and Pageflakes for their Alltop-like reading - i.e. when you just want to scan a bunch of your top news sources - because those apps are much more functional and configurable than Alltop.

Will Alltop entice mainstream readers to follow blogs and use RSS more? I hope it does, but there is still a psychological factor to overcome in getting mainstream people to read blogs. While some people recognize that blogs are as much a part of the news ecosystem as mainstream media these days, many others still see blogging as a way to let the world know what you had for breakfast. So a service like Alltop is unlikely to change the latter attitude, which is unfortunately the most common one (not helped by mainstream media, which often portrays blogs as superficial social networking sites).

RSS for the masses? Not sure I'd go that far, but Alltop is a nice, simple service that you can start pointing your non-geek friends and family to.