Thank you all for my geeky 15 minutes of fame. Please excuse me if I fawn over this whole thing for a moment.
Fred started me off by sending me some link love, but then it was obvious that much more of the traffic was coming from del.icio.us... from people who were clicking on both the popular list and the "web 2.0" tag. Here are the results from my (continuing??) stay near the top end of the del.icio.us popular list from my last top ten post:
I normally get about 500-700 pageviews a day. In the last 24 hours, I've had 6500.
I received 100 new RSS subscribers. (Now I have the pressure of holding on to all of you folks.)
I normally don't get much in the way of comments and trackbacks. That post got 15 and 8 respectively.
MOST importantly, it led to discussions with three interesting people who share my interests and have great blogs of their own. I only talked to them for a little bit, but I got great insight into what they think because they all blog. I IMed with Brian, Keshava and Greg. Brian and Greg are new and had both linked to my post and Keshava dropped me a comment I think. I'd e-mailed Keshava before a few times, but we'd never IMed before and it was a good excuse for us to try Google Talk. We're going to do the Shake Shack next week (hmm... probably should invite Greg, too... Brian's a bit far for such a trip, regardless of how good the shakes are).
Blogs and social tags connect people in a way that wasn't being done just a couple of years ago.
Imagine the analog:
Let's say there are no blogs or tags. Just conferences.
1) First off, no one would have invited me to speak anywhere. So, blogs enable me to invent my own "This is going to be BIG" conference.
2) Even if someone did, after I spoke, my connection with the crowd would have been limited. There wouldn't have been time for the 15 comments. Perhaps afterwards, I could subject myself to the post panel crush, but I'll bet most of those people would have been more interested in showing us deals than just having a discussion. Deals are great, of course, intellectual exchanges are nice, too.
3) Statistically, I probably never would have circulated around the room to these three guys, and besides that, even if I had, without the context of their blogs, links to what they were working on, etc. our conversations would have probably went more like, "Yeah... so... um... good conference, huh? Did you try the cookies? The rainbow ones are sweet."
4) Follow up. How many business cards to you get/give at a conference. How many times do these lead to great connections? Its kind of forced b/c then you have to talk on the phone, or meet, and maybe you don't really have anything to meet about, but you're searching for a connection somehow. I'd rather passively pay attention to someone's blog, then start a conversation if I see our interests align.
So, that post was invaluable from the perspective that now I have a better connection to people around me that are thinking about the same stuff. The traffic was nice, but people are better.