And you are, of course, not alone in your thoughts on this.

I read earlier this month that one of the SB sites nearly crashed and immediately incorporated ‘nofollow’ tags as a result of a huge traffic spike.

This just a day after the release of Don Crowther’s (StomperNet) video. Everyone had rushed to abuse the site.

The “abuse it and lose it” results were practically immediate in that instance.

Had I bookmarked the post, I might have the link to share…

If I run across it again, I’ll post it here.

The fact remains that in this instance industry is a victim of it’s own success.

Although your points are valid, I’m not particularly pleased with being ‘lumped in’ with ‘web professionals’ (when you say “…you are the victims of your own successes…”)

I don’t actually teach overuse (abuse), nor do I promote overuse (abuse) of the services. In fact I’m not particularly wild about bookmarking in the first place!

Furthermore I teach strategy – not spamming, splogging or any other short term fix to traffic woes. This is the age of authenticity. That is what I teach.

Thank you for your comment – everyone needs a voice and I’m happy to provide the venue for your thoughts.

All my best with keeping Web 3.0 a secret from future victims.

Laura

In effect, a few thousand pros are controlling what makes it to the top as they divide and destroy the solo operators so the millions of solo operators simply quit using social bookmarking.

In other words you are victims of your own successes while those of us in the know prepare for the death of Web 2.0 sharecropping and the ushering in of Web 3.0.

FuzzFizz – http://www.fuzzfizz.com

Jack:

I apologize for taking so long to reply! Your comments are triggering my spam plugin…

Your theory is a good one, and I’m not trying to contest it, but I’m certain there are far more people feeding Alexa than internet marketers or site owners.

And although the first paragraph of your comment states it’s used by webmasters, your fourth paragraph negates that – so I’m confused at what you’re getting at.

‘Alexa is crap’ is an old subscribed to theory that may not carry as much weight today as it did a few years back.

For instance if you’re deep into internet research, or follow the theorists and trend-setters (like Seth Godin who has envisioned just about every major play and directional shift of online business for the last 10 years or so) you’ve likely landed on the statsaholic.com site where Ron Hornbaker lays out 5 reasons Alexa traffic data has merit.

Here’s two of them quoted directly from the page:

“Newbies with the Alexa Toolbar are not the only source of data. Firefox users with Craig Raw’s cool SearchStatus extension should note that their browsing behavior is similarly being phoned-home to Alexa, and included in the statistics you see here.”

“Statistical significance is attainable with only a small subset of the population — ask a pollster or a high school math teacher.”

As for onlywire.com – great service, but in many niche markets I’m still not convinced that social bookmarking is as popular as us ‘geek’, webmaster, marketers, would like to believe…

Laura Childs

Alexa gets its stats from people who use their toolbar – predominantly internet marketers, webmasters, people who have sites.

Then they extrapolate data from the obvious tiny source they pull from to represent the whole internet community.

What Alexa says for sure above is that webmasters are no longer visiting their favorite bookmarking sites and that’s probably because of things like http://onlywire.com where you can post to the top bookmark sites without visiting them and with the click of a button and a couple of tags.

Also, webmasters, from my experience, tend to be more private about their bookmarks and don’t naturally want to share where they go and where they’ve been since most of their frequented pages are admin login pages to their sites, email, etc.

In short – website owners most likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed are not visiting the bookmarking sites other than to sign up and get an account, then use tools like OnlyWire to post their stuff remotely.

At least that’s my theory.

Jack

I laughed outloud and my family rushed into the office to see what I was laughing about.

A heavy equipment operator husband and a teenage daughter. Needless to explain I was on my own (laughing).

Thanks for the smile. And the idea! But those ‘death of things’ drive me crazy – I’d rather read and write a ‘here’s how it really works!’ any day.

Ciao Bella! Chat with you soon…