The downward path this chart takes corresponds with the rollout of the new Gawker design, which trades the reverse chronological layout typical of most blogs for a  single story layout with headlines in a smaller bar on the right.

Part of the reason may lie in the new URL structure which uses a hash bang (#!). In laymens terms, for some search engines and websites, it replaces an individual page for each post with a placeholder. Essentially, even though you see one individual story for each URL, search spiders and other websites may see it as one part of the same, giant page. Facebook is one of those sites, making it a bit more difficult for any particularly salacious stories to spread virally.

For a brief period of time, this made stories disappear from Google News, and while that issue has been rectified, it doesn’t look like traffic is rebounding.

That may point to frustrations from commenters, who have been vocal about their dislike for the new layout that makes individual commenters more difficult to follow, and generally makes it harder to follow conversations on individual stories. While every redesign normally finds a vocal group expressing their outrage (Facebook, Starbucks, anyone?), judging by the drop off in traffic this may be a redesign that needs to be rethought. On more than a few blogs, including Gawker itself, it seems that the network is trying to find a middle ground that features larger images and headlines for featured stories, but more of them than the much derided single story layout.

io9, the sci-fi blog in the Gawker network, introduced the new layout earlier than other sites, and the decline in traffic is stark. Fleshbot (Quantcast link, safe for work), the porn blog which did not adopt the new layout has had stable traffic levels for most of the month. Sports blog Deadspin hasn’t had any additional declines in traffic since introducing the new layout, and Lifehacker actually seems to have had a slight uptick.

As a whole, while there’s no way to know if the drop off in traffic is a result of a mass exodus of commenters or a mass drop in pages included in Google, something has to change again if Denton wants to hang on to pageviews and the $1000 he bet on them. {Business Insider}

Gizmodo Traffic

Deadspin Traffic

Kotaku Traffic

Jalopnik Traffic

io9 Traffic

Jezebel Traffic

Lifehacker Traffic

"A friend of a friend went to a bar, and all I got was a lousy police raid"

Gizmodo received heavy media coverage for publishing photos and specifications of an unreleased iPhone prototype, but some – including Apple, have questioned the legality of how the company came into possession of the top-secret device. According to Gizmodo accounts, the phone was left in a bar by Gray Powell, an Apple employee out celebrating his 27th birthday. {Gizmodo}

Powell left the iPhone prototype at the bar where he’d been drinking, and someone who’d been sitting next to him eventually ended up with the phone. Despite a few phone calls and emails to Apple, no one returned the inquiries about how to return the device. A few weeks later, with no word from Apple, the person who found it sold it to Gizmodo for $5000.

In California, buying stolen property is a crime, but that’s where things get a bit fuzzy. If the person at the bar who found Powell’s phone had indeed made efforts to return it to Apple, did he actually steal it? Further, if his account is accurate, could it be considered stolen property if the owner never responded to attempts to return it?

Apparently Apple, who is notorious for secretive testing and release practices that make the military look chatty, thinks so.

So last Friday, San Mateo police armed with a search warrant broke down Chen’s door while he was at dinner with his wife and seized business cards, 3 MacBooks, 2 digital cameras, 1 Dell desktop, an IBM Thinkpad, 2 external hard drives,  a Motorola phone, an iPhone, an iPad and a server.

Our first thought is that Chen would be a really good friend to have if you ever needed to use a computer, but a close second is that in addition to seeming pretty heavy handed, it doesn’t seem legal unless there’s some indication that the person who found the phone in the first place didn’t make an effort to return it to Apple. Additionally, there are questions surrounding the legality of seizing the items from a journalist, since the investigation seems to focus on revealing more information on the source who sold the lost iPhone.

We’re guessing this means Gizmodo is officially off of the Apple press preview list.