Traffic Generation

By: Sparxoo

Mainstream media should have a pulse on what’s most important in society. The front page of the New York Times (NYT) should be a slice of general society’s interest for that day. What about social bookmarking sites? Since readers pick their favorites to make their own front page, social bookmarking sites should reflect the interests of the community.

Does mainstream media, like the NYT, parallel those interests of social media? Yes and no. Madoff making away with $50 billion makes the front page of Digg and the NYT. True, there’s a lot of parallels with social media and mainstream media, but you will never see, “Identifying yourself as a lesbian gets you banned on Xbox Live” on the front page of the New York Times.


In a world where the news cycle is shorter than your drive to work, the NYT does a surprisingly good job keeping up. Social bookmarking sites are constantly updated by millions of users every day. It’s like strapping news to a rocket and blasting off every 30 minutes. While the NYT is a top source for bookmarking sites, we can see the emergence of an entirely different, new, alternative media. YouTube, The Huffington Post, Artstechnica are some of the alternative media ahead of the curve–receiving the torch passed on from traditional media.

Back to the post title question: Are social bookmarking sites a pulse on societal trends? Our hypothesis was, yes. Let’s focus on one of Web 2.0’s most popular social bookmarking sites, Digg. To test this theory, we took the top dugg topics on Digg and plugged the top NYT topics into Google Trends. Were we right? Yes and no. The top dugg topics were shifted versus the NYT. Here is what we found.

To see the findings, visit Sparxoo.com.