One my favorite features on the homepage of thenewstribune.com is the list of the top 5 most popular stories. It quickly tells the audience which of our news stories is drawing the most interest.

Occasionally, an older story will get linked by a high-traffic web site that sends hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new readers to our site. It happened again today when Yahoo News linked to our coverage of the Foss school shooting as a related link to its coverage of a bomb plot uncovered in Connecticut.

Then, once a story gets in the top 5, more readers click on it, creating a sort of vicious circle. That's a bit of what's happening today as about one-third of the page views are coming from thenewstribune.com, the other two-thirds are coming from Yahoo.

So remember, when you're looking at the top 5 stories on our site or other sites, those are the most popular stories from all Internet traffic. Not just traffic from the web site you're visiting.