Relax. Whenever I go gasoline syphoning, I scrawl "The Oil Drum was here." onto the bumbers. So the time when the Times links to your site in a tiny sidebar will come sooner than later.

Thus far, my site has only gotten three visits from the Times link and two of those were from me testing the link.

Best,

Matt

No need to worry about TOD exposure.  This site is so cross linked to the other sites that people will get here as a second or third link.  The people that are inquisitive and scientific minded will stay and browse the details.  The others will go  back to the other sites for an easy summary of what they should do.

You can't force people to accept hard truths, only expose them to it.

You have done your part well.  Give yourself a pat on the back and wait for the knowledge stored here to filter out.

Is it because the site is so good that other people should read it thus making their lives better by better preparing for post peak?

Is it that you want more posters here to learn more stuff from?

Is it that TOD readers are somehow cooler?

Does it generate a 'tribal algorithm' feel-good camaraderie like a fraternity, or a club, or a sports team might?

Something else?

Any reason is valid, if we choose to feel that way, its because we like it, which is OK. Just interesting to think about the 'why' sometimes.

You've got my vote for quote of the year Matt.  I suggest selling T-shirts and coffee mugs with the above words in neon font.  

"In the past, we'd go kill somebody and take their stuff."
Yes, though we can be quite a cooperative species - the catch is that our Enviroment of Evolutionary Adaptedness was that of small groups, where, like the TV show Cheers, everyone knew your name.  Once populations go beyond that, the trouble really begins.

I started a peak oil site back in October 2003 (if you do a Spanish language search for "peak oil", Crisis Energética would come in first position). I am a technical journalist (IT) and I did that because I always have felt the need of communicating with others, specially when there's something important to say. In our forums, we have a thread called "New users, introduce yourselves here", almost everyone contributing to that thread there thanks the founders and users of the site saying things like "I was feeling alone, I thought I was nuts!, I needed to find people with the same concerns as yours". Of course it helps being the largest peak oil site in Spanish (English continues to be a barrier for a lot of Spanish Internet users).

Our visitors base is smaller than TOD or LATOC (btw, thanks again Mat, you're sending us lots of users), but our site has, as today, 1829 registered users (the majority of them doesn't contribute, but I suppose they find useful to receive the daily digest), and our forums have already passed the 20K messages mark.

I know we could do "better" than that, in the sense of getting more traffic and visitors (we hover between 2k and 4,5k unique daily users), but we have chosen not to go over the board with the issue (being a self taught journalist helps a bit also). Before starting the site, I went to see a geology professor from my local university, he's the only Spanish member of ASPO, and a frequent contributor to the main Spanish newspapers (when they let him). He gave me a very good advise, very similar to something I have read today here at TOD (thanks NC):

You can't force people to accept hard truths, only expose them to it

So that's the way we do it, perhaps is slower, but the people who finally come aboard and contribute are the best ones. And I think TOD is that kind of site also (well, I think TOD surpasses us in many aspects!).