Top Stories from the Week of May 9 -13, 2011

As the hoopla of recent geo-political events fades, bloggers have reset their Google goggles from wide-perspective to self-exam-close-up. This week Pew Research Center released a new study unveiling what drives people to the top 25 news websites in the USA, and get ready to have your mind blown! Ok, not really, but it's somewhat interesting. As illustrated in this blue egg-within-egg graphic here, direct traffic to the news sites still makes up 60 to 65 percent of arrivals; traffic from referring links accounts for 35 - 40 percent. And that's just the tip of the pencil. Here's a new factoid that has All Twitter's mouth hanging open: "Rather than driving significant traffic to the likes of the Washington Post and the New York Times, Twitter barely registers as a traffic source at all." Really? "There were only four major news sites that saw more than 1% of their traffic come from Twitter " The main beneficiary of Twitter refers in the study? The LA Times, which received 3.53% of its traffic from Twitter, which was more than it received from Facebook (2.05%).