My post from this weekend. about why newspapers have not charged readers the cost of content production since the 1830s, went viral Thursday morning. So this morning I jumped into some analytics to study how it happened. I thought I'd share the findings for anyone who might find it useful or interesting.

The major find: Ideas like this spread through social networks, peer-to-peer, then find their way into blogs and MSM sources next.

As best I can reconstruct, a few of my Twitter followers started retweeting the post link late Wednesday. The firestorm really started, though, after former washingtonpost.com Editor Jim Brady and later NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted it.

From there it started a cascade of retweets and e-mails from a network of followers. This got the attention of some mainstream news sites and blogs, including The Guardian, Media Bistro and Salon, which solidified the meme.

Overall, almost two-thirds of the visits seem to have come from Twitter.com or direct traffic that was mostly via Twitter clients. Here is the percentage of visits by top sources chart: