Chitika looked at referral data for more than 120M impressions across 60,000 sites and concluded that Search remains the undisputed king of traffic referrals - and it's not close:

Thanks to Chitika for exposing this fascinating data. 

Note: One possible explanation for why this data might be skewed in favor of search - sites that use Chitika might be more search friendly than social friendly, due to this product.

I just learned that eBay has partnered with Widgetbox to allow eBay sellers to convert eBay RSS feeds to widgets.

This is a baby step to be sure - companies like Cartfly and Adgregate Markets are being far more aggressive about functionality within the widget itself and are focused exclusively on commerce, while Widgetbox's RSS to widget publisher is a bit more general purpose. 

But you can bet that eBay will be tracking store propagation, click throughs, and conversion from this new project.  If things go well, we may see more movement in this area.

This is also a nice distribution win for Widgetbox - I consider their RSS to widget publisher ("Blidget") to be the best out there, and apparently eBay agrees with me.

Here's a sample widget.

From where I'm sitting, it appears that TechCrunch is evaluating the two major competing blog commenting services to be the default provider for TechCrunch comments: Disqus and JS-Kit.

Here's Michael Arringon on JS-Kit's new product ECHO:

And in this post, TechCrunch is taking Disqus 3.0 for a spin.

Additionally, Seesmic video comments seem to have been ripped out of TechCrunch.

I'm not going to spend any time debating which of the two services is better - both are well backed companies with quality products and solid teams.  But this looks like a critical moment in the ongoing skirmish between JS-Kit and Disqus.

When Twitter unceremoniously dumped TinyURL for Bit.ly, the URL shortening wars were all but finished.  I don't expect TechCrunch's decision to carry quite the same impact, but there is no question that TechCrunch sits high on the distribution head for any company looking to secure blog commenting.  It does big traffic, it reaches virtually all earlier adopters / bloggers, and it will no doubt be a fabulous case study for whoever wins the business.  And TC's decision can't come soon enough - I don't know of a blog on the planet with more of an anon troll / commenter reputation problem than TechCrunch.

Additionally, the blog commenting space may very well be a winner take all situation.  As I wrote in an earlier post:

I believe that the blog commenting space has some serious network effects - the more blogs that adopt a certain, distributed blog comment provider, the more pressure there is on other blogs to switch over as not to silo themselves (and their commenters)... Because of these network effects, we may very well see a winner take all scenario emerge at some point in this space.  For this reason, today's skirmishes between the blog commenting contenders are worth following.

I've been following the blog commenting space for a while.  See here, here, here, here, here, and here

It will be interesting to see whether a nod from TechCrunch will be enough to tip this space in either Disqus' or JS-Kit's direction.

Here are some write-ups of Disqus V3: Disqus, TechCrunch, Mashable

And here are some write-ups of JS-Kit ECHO: JS-Kit, TechCrunch, Mashable

This feature is an obvious ode to Posterous, the lightweight blogging platform whose primary publishing UI is the user's email client / service.

We're a small shop, so choosing what to work on is a big deal.  There were all sorts of other important things that we could have worked on - improving our search engine, making our service more accessible to mobile users, improving new user experience, etc. - but we chose to focus on email, an older, less sexy format.

I'm always interested in hearing about the thought processes that drive other entrepreneurs' decisions, so I thought it might be interesting to share ours.  Here we go.

1) With a small team, we try and put resources into the things that are working (as opposed to things that aren't).  This philosophy applies not only to our own projects, but what we see when we look around the social media landscape.  Posterous is working.

2) We are constantly looking at ways to reduce the barriers to contributing content.  We've implemented Facebook Connect, we've experimented with delaying the registration prompt as long as possible, and we've tried other UI tweaks to make it easier and faster to contribute content.  We're enamored by the concept of "lazy registration."  With emailed reviews, the emailed review IS the registration.

3) Email still figures prominently in our referral logs, much more so than Facebook and Twitter.  Social distribution gets all the buzz, but based on our logs, email still dwarfs those channels as a distribution channel.  Clearly, people are very comfortable sharing content via email - why not let them post it as well?

4) Virtually everyone who is online is comfortable with email as a publishing UI.  By teaching our service to accept content from a universal UI, we hope to make it less of a scary proposition for new users to get involved with our site. 

5) Emailed reviews represents our first baby step towards being a mobile service.  Anyone with a smartphone can now post reviews on the go.

That's our story and we're sticking to it.  In the meantime, you can post a review of this blog - instantly - by sending an email HERE.

Union Square Ventures made a similar Web Meets World observation when announcing its investment in Meetup - the online tool for organizing and managing offline communities.  Here's Union Square Ventures partner Brad Burnham describing Meetup as the original "web meets world" company:

Today, the backlash against fun and and non world saving apps seems to have subsided, likely due to Twitter.  Twitter's ability to be trivial, silly, and, yet sporadically, unintentionally useful has made it hip to be lightweight again, as has the success of social gaming companies like Zynga in achieving traction + revenue.

Now, Union Square Ventures lists "playful" as one of it's six guiding principles.  This institutionalized acceptance of "fun" is a big switch from even a year ago.

But let's get back to Web Meets World.  I've always held that the strongest online communities were the ones that had offline extensions of their online relationships.  The WebmasterWorld Forum was my first exposure to an online community that pushed its tentacles out to the offline world.  In 2003, when independent web publishers like myself were trying to make sense of Google's Florida update, the same guys who debated Google's algorithm with me in the forums congregated in Orlando to get drunk, and help each other live and in person.  Online meeting offline, thus making the online community stronger.

And there are plenty of other examples.  I'm convinced that Yelp succeeded while the similarly well funded Insider Pages, Zipingo, and Judy's Book failed in part due to its early emphasis on offline community.  I remember sitting in Zeitgeist in 2005 (?) and having two cute girls approach me and ask me if I wanted to go to a Yelp party.  These parties became the thing of legend, and increased Yelp's rep among urban hipsters, who now generate most of their content.

Again, online pushing out to offline, reinnforcing the online.

Now, I am starting to notice a new aspect to this Web Meets World phenomenon.

Web Meets World is becoming more than just the online relationships moving offline.  Now, there are companies like Foursquare and Booyah (and Brightkite) whose APPS are spanning offline and online.  Here's an excerpt about Foursquare from the Observer:

"If you're having a slamming Saturday night, there's no reason why it shouldn't feel like a game of Legend of Zelda," said Dennis Crowley, who was presenting his new mobile social networking application, Foursquare, on March 9 at the monthly New York Tech Meetup. "What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game. You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars--just experiencing things that you wouldn't normally do."

And here's a description of Booyah from TechCrunch:

These are fun apps - they're not trying to solve the world's problems, but they are trying to integrate themselves into the daily, real lives of their participants via mobile applications.  These apps are trying to make a game out of existing behaviors.  You're doing all this stuff anyway, say Booyah and Foursquare, why not win some points and badges and reputation and keep a digital diary and meet similar people while you're at it.

These companies are not feeding the world's hungry, or beating malaria, or rebuilding New Orleans - in fact, the infamous Keg Standing Scoble critique made by Umair Haque would probably be applicable to (and embraced by) both of these companies.  But their work in binding offline and online worlds is important for our industry.  It's showing us that Web Meets World doesn't have to be heavy and world changing -  people like to keep score, they like to win, and they like to have fun - even in their most mundane activities.  And mobile is providing the recording device. 

I suspect that we will see more apps that attempt to log existing offline behavior in a game format in an effort to blend online and offline - this is the fun side of Web Meets World.

Feel free to contact me directly.

I've been talking a lot on this blog about maximizing your site's distribution via social media river services like Facebook and Twitter.

And there are LOTS of folks working on this.  In just the past few weeks, Socializr, Digg, Lunch.com, and my employer RateItAll, to name a few, have announced tighter Facebook and Twitter integration.  Spymaster is an even more pronounced example of a service that is uber-optimized for Twitter distribution.

The idea here is pretty simple - find ways to push, or help your users push, your site's activity out into the larger social media rivers, with the hopes of driving clicks back to home base.

Let's call this the Inside Out strategy.

But what would happen if we we flipped this strategy on its head?  What if in addition to optimizing your site's activity for distribution on Facebook and Twitter, you tweaked your service to accept content from activity within those services? 

A new service launched today with a pretty slick implementation of this sort of Outside In strategy.

Blubet is a social betting service where you make bets with your friends (e.g. "I bet the Phillies will win tonight!"), and win points for correct predictions.  Where it gets interesting is that Blubet doesn't care where you place your bets.  You can place them on Blubet.com, or you can place them on Twitter.

Here's how a bet placed on Twitter works:

Once you have synced your Blubet account with Twitter, you can send a direct message to @blubet with your bet.  Blubet processes your bet and updates your status with a link to the bet on Blubet.com.  So in effect, you can play Blubet without leaving Twitter.  Here's what the flow looks like:

In my original post on the subject, I suggested a couple of challenges for this sort of implementation:

Blubet's DM implementation is a good, explicit first step.  But as users grow more accustomed to the concept of apps living on top of Twitter, I expect apps to move even more aggressively towards just accepting Twitter content in its natural format, without forcing a DM or a hashtag.

You can see MG Siegler's write up of Blubet here.

Disclosure: Blubet's Director of Product is my wife.