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According to the latest data from Hitwise about Twitter users in the UK, Twitter has become an important source of traffic for entertainment sites, other social networks, and news and media sites, but compared to other social networks, Twitter only sends a small amount of traffic to online retailers. Hitwise's Robin Goad also points out that Twitter is now the 30th biggest source of traffic in the UK and accounts for 1 out of every 350 visits to a typical web site in the UK.

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.

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As a website or blog publisher, you've likely often wondered, "Who is visiting my website?" Traffic stats are readily available, so you already know that your unique visitors are up this week, and average time on-site is holding steady, and you're slowly beating down that ugly bounce rate, but what you don't know is who these people are. Are they social media geeks? Are they stay-at-home moms? Are they 20-something males with an interest in extreme sports?