Bubble Spike?

People are starting to wise up to the distortions of bubble math surrounding the recent rush of interest in socially oriented websites steaming ahead under the banner of Web 2.0, but it is interesting to look beyond the hype to get a qualitative glimpse that something significant is indeed happening...

This plot shows a comparison of several of the best known social bookmarking and linking aggregators - play around with entering other sites that you know about, and you'll immediately see the pattern of increasing traffic that has emerged over the past 8 months. Including the venerable Slashdot as an indicator of just how marked this trend really is. These Alexa stats seem to give a broad confirmation that social networks are gaining on internet portals.

But to put the phenomenal rise of Digg in perspective, here is a comparison with Craigslist and Flickr. Then here, we can also add MySpace and Google to the mix to get a relative sense of scale. In the short term, it looks like this long tail will continue to wag, but there is almost certainly trouble on the near horizon, not to mention the imminent breakout surge of Vista.