RT.COM commercial says Obama’s nuclear threat is greater than that from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who are a friend of Russia.

In the early February 2009 RussiaToday.com (or ANO “TV-Novosti”) have bought RT.TV domain name for a whopping $62,500 from a private cybersquatter John van den Berg. Such a big price for a national TLD made the deal the biggest one in the .TV top-level sector in the Q1 2009.

Approximately in the same time RussiaToday bought RT.COM domain name and changed its brandname to a trendy short RT.COM. This deal was not covered in the domain sales media, and the price of purchase wasn’t disclosed. But it can be figured out pretty easily. Short .COM domain names are usually at least ten times more expensive than .NET of the same length. In 2009 not so phonetically pleasing two letter .NET domains were traded for about $150,000.

RT.COM – registered by the first cybersquatters back in 1991 is a great value today. Abbrevations.com returns 88 results for RT. So I think TV-Novosti paid at least $3,000,000 for RT.COM (perhaps, much more). Well, not a sacrifice for an oil-buffed country which have spent on its English language heavy artillery of propaganda at least $90M (perhaps, much more) in the first (2005) year of operation, according to Wikipedia.

It’s natural. However the modern life makes people to specialize on some pretty specific subjects, their out of office circle of interests is much wider. Separate twitter-like services allow to save all that mind-pasta without cluttering the main blog or personal website.

Twitter/Plurk/Jaiku and so on are good but they are the social networks by their nature. Also, they have too much limitations such as 160 chars maximum, their native web-interfaces are too complicated and overloaded with the social features.

TXT.IO by Thomas Marban from Linz, Austria (the same guy who have made popurls.com) is what the doctor prescribed. Its web interface is very clean, it works very fast thanks to Google App Engine cloud hosting solution and whistles-free interface. Also:

• you don’t need to remember another one login/pass combo if you have Google account
• you can store any url as long as you want because there’s no (un)reasonable limits on post length
• you can use formating in you posts
• you can post your TXT.IO records almost everywhere because you have a full text RSS feed

Here is my txt.io: http://txt.io/666

• StumbleUpon – 153,837 unique visitors this year so far
• Reddit – 10,099
• Vykop.pl – 9,824
• Shoutwire – 1,407
• Meneame.net – 826

StubleUpon: You need to get at least 50 positive reviews to get high enough in the queue to get more than 10k unique visitors per day. The effect lasts for a several days. The tale is long and fluffy – if you have 10k U.V. a day while on the top of the queue, you will get 100k for the next month. Good link baiting abilities.

• 1st day – 9,653
• 2nd day – 13,293
• 3rd day – 10,040
• 4th day – 8,274
• 5th day – 7,893
• 6th day – 7,883
• 7th day – 7,357
• 8th day – 6,684
• 9th day – 5,315
• than two weeks plateau around 4k unique visitors a day
• and after that – several months of ~300 UV per day

Reddit: hitting the front page will give approximately 1.5k unique visitors every hour you are on it (depending on time and news title). To hit the front page you need to get at least 30-40 points (up votes minus down votes) in the first hour after submit and keep this trend running. Top news on Reddit have up to 800 points. The tale is short and thin. Quite good link baiting abilities.

Vykop.pl – Polish 100% Digg clone. Surprisingly high trafficked. You can get around 10k UV a day from its front page. The tale is very short and thin. You need at least 60 up votes in the first couple of hours to get to the front page. The only way to get attention for the non-Polish language sites – show a lot of interesting and self descriptory pictures.

Shoutwire: Digg clone. Easy to get to the top but low on traffic. No more than 1.5k per day from the front page.

Meneame.net: Spanish Digg clone. Mostly Spain traffic, with just about 10% South Amertican. Up to 20k a day from the front page. You need at least 50-60 up votes in the first couple of hours. The tale is short but quite fluffy. Spanish language or a lot of pics are essential.

As you can see, almost all (two thirds, to be precise) unique visitors came from the StumbleUpon. It is a best Web 2.0 traffic source. Moreover, it is considerably easy to get the pretty high ranking there.

And for my surprise, a well known and pretty popular Shoutwire social network have delivered seven times less visitors than Polish Digg clone Wykop. Although the story was on the frontpage of both of them for a couple of days.