Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter
Twitter is one of the top referrers of traffic to my blog, over 2000 referrers from twitter to my blog in the last 30 days...there's something happening there. — I've also noticed and increase of new users over the past 30 days, feel free to add me as a friend, I will add you back.
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier in 2007 the corpus treated Twitter as an experiment space — Twittering Your Home in March tested it against household devices. By this December post, the same service has become measurable as a distribution channel: the author reports over 2,000 referrals from Twitter to his blog in 30 days, making it a top referrer alongside established sources.
The signal traveled narrowly at first — Logic+Emotion picked up the story the same day, framing Twitter's growth as a 'conversation ecosystem' rather than a broadcast tool. That framing matches the author's own behavior here: he converts raw traffic data into a networking move, inviting new users to connect and promising reciprocal follows.
First-order effects
- Bloggers who track their own analytics — the author included — gain a new traffic line item to optimize: Twitter referrals now sit among their top sources, rewarding active participation over passive publishing.
- Twitter's new-user wave becomes self-reinforcing through follow-back culture, since each invite-and-reciprocate exchange adds both participants' networks.
Second-order effects
- Toolmakers respond by wiring Twitter into adjacent apps — Twype.exe already syncs tweets with Skype mood status as of October 2007 — pushing Twitter toward infrastructure rather than a standalone destination.
- Other bloggers face competitive pressure to show up where conversations happen; a blog that ignores its referrer data cedes audience to peers who work the channel.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, publishers begin measuring 'conversational referrers' as a distinct category from search and RSS, and their reach grows dependent on a third-party network they neither host nor control.
- Unconfirmed ideas circulating in the corpus — mobile ad units rumored in October, proposals for richer media 'payloads' — point toward the platform monetizing or expanding exactly this attention flow.
The trend: Blog distribution is shifting from search-and-RSS gatekeeping toward conversation-driven referrals, with personal referrer logs serving as the earliest quantitative evidence of the shift.