Looking at some general third-party statistics, it would appear that blogs are an increasing selection of where the frequent flyer seeks information from. Here's a third-party chart from Alexa.com, a web traffic monitoring service of Amazon which compares the huge forum FlyerTalk to that of the frequent flyer blogger portal BoardingArea. It would appear that generally forums such as FlyerTalk are holding steady or on a slightly downward trend while the BoardingArea blog site is enjoying a huge gain in traffic and readers. It will be interesting to look at this late in 2013 to see where each is headed at that point. And BoardingArea is way more popular that the fledging Milepoint as well.
does that include views via RSS readers? For example, with Google Reader, you aren't really taken to the site, and in boarding area's case, you can read the entire article in place, and I haven't seen BA add any ads to the view I get in Reader. Other sites just show a summary with or without an ad, and you have to go to the actual site to read the full article. -David
No, it doesn't include RSS readers which is pretty positive which would mean even more growth. Not a statement of forums but a general observation that the modern frequent flyer is rounding out the various resources it uses to stay informed. MilePoint thinks there will be a few other new resources in the near future and we'll strive to continue leading development of these.
For Boarding Area blogs (ie, View From the Wing, One Mile at a Time, Frequent Miler, and other blogs hosted on BoardingArea.com) I get the full article in Reader in my browser (http://www.google.com/reader) if I click on the headline and expand the article. Engadget and TUAW and many other blogs behave the same way. Many other non-Boarding Area blogs just show a summary, for example, "The Gate", NY Times feeds, and some other show a very brief summary or first sentence of the article, and you have to open the article at the source to read the rest of it. Some, like "Ars Technica", show a few paragraphs of the article and you have to open the article to read the rest of it. If you aren't seeing that, look around and play with the various settings, I seem to recall there was a setting for summary view or something like that, but I can't find it now. This is how it works for me using google reader in my web browser (google chrome, but other browsers work the same way.) Here's an example, just a short article, but the longer ones are inline as well. -David
You're in 'list view' ... hit the "1" button and this should expand. Then you can return to list view by hitting "2"
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