Could Twitter Cannibalize the Web's Link Graph

Today, at the SMX Sydney conference, Darren Rowse and I had a fascinating conversation that I felt compelled to share.

In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn't uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What's happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:

• Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
• Blogging, at least in the "bleeding edge" technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.), is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there's certainly some circumstantial evidence - just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 - there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
• Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.

This last one is fascinating to me, and carries some interesting connotations. If the trend is real, and continues, it seems very likely to me that the search engines will need to start relying on Twitter's tweet graph, particularly for "new" information and content?

Darren and I remarked that:

• Twitter, and sites that aggregate data from it, like Tweetmeme, actually expose content before social voting sites like Digg, Reddit or Hacker News
• It can be 12-24 hours between when content is first "tweeted" vs. when it earns its first external link
• Many pieces of "throwaway" content (a quick, funny image, post or video) will earn virtually no links, even if hundreds of people have shared them on Twitter

I think it's way too early to determine if this trend is real or if it will continue, but the SEO industry has been talking for years about when the engines might start to evolve beyond link analysis. This is one of the first credible expansions I've seen.

Love to hear your thoughts (and please remember, this is just my personal impression & opinion).

p.s. A good post on a simlar topic comes from Aaron Wall - How Twitter Can Be Corrosive to Online Marketing.