Making My Readers Famous: Ryan Knowles

A while ago I have begun to write about the visitors to my blog. MyBlogLog widget gave me new way to see the visitors to my blog, faceless numbers in my site statistics are slowly transforming into visitors who’s faces/avatars I see in among recent visitors widget located in the side bar of my website. There are days that instead of working I find myself visiting websites and blogs of those who have recently stopped by. I have found many great websites and blogs this way.

One of my recent visitors was Ryan Knowles, a software engineer of 8 years and a founder and developer of PlugIM– an internet marketing social bookmarking and news website. Inspired by Digg, PlugIM allows users to submit stories and articles where other users can “plug” your article all the way to the front page. I have noticed PlugIM a while ago when one of my articles was submitted there but have not registered until few days ago.

As we ushered in 2007, it was said, among so many other predictions, that when it comes to web site traffic 2007 will be a year of natural search results. As I look on the statistics of some of my websites, it is very clear that 2007 will be a year of social networking. More that 50% of the visitors to my site are coming form social websites like PlugIM, BumpZee and many others.

It is also true that search engines are constantly crawling these kind of websites and communities. As of this writing Google has indexed 3250 pages from PlugIM. And my favorite BumpZee has 3140 pages indexed in Google, which I find phenomenal considering the fact that BumpZee went live with its own URL on January 12.

If anything the year 2007 is going to be a year of online social communities.