It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight.

The Day The World Got Geeky

Ian Clarke writes, "Did the world get geekier around April 20th?"

Some kind of change to how Alexa calculates traffic – or did something happen to so dramatically affect these four websites? Perhaps a bunch of geeks suddenly decided to become Alexa users.

Alex Walker noticed the phenomenon as early as the 27th, titling it "The Great Internet Spike of 2006."  Alex noticed that only tech sites seemed to benefit from the Alexa bump:

sites with no notable ‘tech-skew’ (i.e. CNN.com, EBAY.com, etc) have either held firm or been shuffled backwards by the sites bubbling up around them.

Have Alexa changed their statistical algorithms?
Is this a temporary anomoly?
Which sites lost out the worst?

Even Digg users have been speculating:

hayseed: also possible that a crapload of people installed the alexa toolbar at that time as a result of some sort of promotion ...

hottuna: Alexa is so incredible unreliably its strange that the site hasn't been shut down.

jarcoal: exactly. there have been several articles reporting major traffic boosts in the last few months. i'll bet this is all some stupid glitch.

When Elephants Fight

I've been looking at this a bit, and I'm convinced it's no Alexa glitch.  Rather, the Alexa population did, in fact, change overnight.

Here's the funny part: Digg users were the scalawags who did it!

DiggLicious gives you live updates of what's going on both digg and del.icio.us. 

...you can observe a live view of the action on these two sites without having to reload your browser. If a site interests you click on it to check it out, then return here and use the handy links to go directly to del.icio.us to bookmark it or digg.com to digg it!

It gives a nice snapshot of the action going on within both sites, but of course, doesn't replace either of them.  Nice tool.

So... A response to my last article: Digg vs. Slashdot: A Comparison article seemed to be better-suited to Digg. I would have thought it better to Slashdot.

But what I found most interesting about getting that article on Digg was that, in the end, all the response I got to the article seemed to match perfectly my stereotyping of Digg: That is, no continutity in comments, no useful conversation, and no sense of community. All in all, it appears that everyone on Digg doesn't seem to be capable of understanding that article. One really good response came out of that post - and, of course, it wasn't on Digg. This article "Why Digg sucks... and how it could be better" sums up basically everything I didn't say, and that was how to go about improving Digg: And that is to put up a comment system that supports conversation, so that you can see which conversations are replies and which ones aren't.

For some eight years, Slashdot has been the most well known provider of News for Nerds. I doubt that anyone would disagree with me if I said it wasn't well deserved. The editors of Slashdot know well their target audience, and (for some strange reason), they know which articles tend to fit into the site well and which ones don't. Digg (pushed heavily by Kevin Rose, formerly of TechTV), is a newcomer to the world, but has still managed to become a formidable force in terms of the number of visitors it is able to pull to the sites it promotes. I recall hearing on an episode of TWiT that Kevin hoped to outdo Slashdot at some point in time. So, it makes sense that they should be compared.