I won’t be able to follow up on the blog traffic prediction ideas for a while, so I’m linkdumping a bunch of stuff on blog traffic here as research material.

Traffic Patterns: weekday traffic versus weekend traffic. Blogs look like every other site family I’ve ever seen, and reflect the fact that there are more people using the internet during weekdays than on weekends.

The Tipping Blog: Microcontent News on meme-spread via blogs, with reference to The Tipping Point.

Blog Traffic: how to draw it.

Traffic Doesn’t Matter: Seth Godin, saying outrageous stuff. Personally, I say treat everything the man writes as suspect. But he’s always thought provoking. Note: He is a TypePad user: expect some bogus marketing book on blogs from him by spring, if not earlier. This entirely unfair, but I worked for man once who tried to live, eat breathe and think ideas from Godin’s oeuvre: it sucked.

The majority of the sites I found were entirely focused on the idea that increasing your traffic is a Good Thing. None appeared to treat it as a problem to be solved, at first glance.

A corollary to this is that for ten years now it’s been apparent that the internet itself, both in terms of data and users, has been in a state of rapid growth. In a way, all you really had to do to predict growth was to develop and present an organic website, which is what many of the ‘how-to’ guides recommend. Obviously, it’s time to move beyond that set of advice.