Nearly two years ago, as part of my ongoing Metafilter Statistics project, I decided to see which websites the Metafilter community was linking to most frequently. With Matt Haughey’s help, I analyzed a complete dump of every post and came up with this list.

Now, two years later, I ran it again. Some of the results are surprising, as you can see below.

In the space of two years, YouTube launched and became the 15th most popular site, Flickr jumped 2,400 places to #14, and Wikipedia went from #66 to #2. Other big winners included Ask Metafilter, Times Online, Archive.org, and MSNBC. Huge losers that fell off the Top 50 entirely were Nandotimes.com (stopped publishing), News.cnet.com (changed domains), Observer.co.uk, and ZDnet.com.

Update: Some people in the Metatalk thread had questions about my methodology. The number next to each link is the jump in rank from the 2002 list. I’m only counting links in the front-page post itself, not the comments. And in the complete list, I’m excluding the 26,123 sources with only one link to conserve space.

Continue reading “Metafilter Sources 2006” →

If you happen to be at the Webvisions conference in Portland this week, you should come by my session Thursday afternoon.

I’ve been to several tech conferences in the last six months, and I can’t count the times I’ve been disappointed to find that a presentation that sounds interesting is either deadly boring or a poorly-disguised product pitch. Even when I was on the advisory board for the last Emerging Technology conference, I was surprised at how often the exciting pitches we approved ended up in lackluster talks.

So, when I was asked to speak, I tried to make a presentation that I would personally want to watch. I picked a topic I cared about and researched it to death — library research, original interviews, and plenty of web dumpster diving. It was a blast, and reminded me of what I missed most about college.

The topic: I’ll be speaking about how and why virtual communities meet in real life, from ham radio to modern online communities. It’s a topic that’s interested me since the BBS era, which I’ll also be touching on. I’m very deliberately not talking about Upcoming.org or anything else Yahoo-related.

Whether it’ll actually be interesting to anyone else but me is up in the air. This is my first solo conference talk and I’m terribly nervous. Hopefully, I’ll be able to hide it well enough so that the material doesn’t suffer. Anyway, I’ll link to responses as they come in after my session, so wish me luck!

July 21: This is my first Webvisions, and it strikes me as both very intimate and very well-run. My talk went very well. So many people have asked to see my slides that I’m going to write up some of my research and do a screencast of my talk.

Some reviews: Brian Oberkirch, Adam Darowski, Paul Bausch, Jeremiah Owyang.