Almost on a daily basis we are confronted with evidence that "things" have changed in the media game.

Today’s case: an unexpectedly large readership this week for a story in our online archives from June. The story, about Michael Gannon first gained national attention back in June, and was linked to from Slashdot.org, sending tens of thousands of visitors to the Telegraph web site.

Yesterday Gannon’s story again began receiving higher than normaltraffic, and after a bit of digging,we figured out why.

Slashdot was not promoting the story, but it had posted another article: Reuters and Yahoo! Enlist Camera Phones which linked as a ‘related story’ back to their original mention of Gannon.

So,readers needed to first open and read a story about Reuters usingcamera phones, then click on a link at the bottom to go to anotherSlashdot story, and then click a link there to go back to our site.

Andyet, almost 1,000 people have done so in 24 hours. That puts asix-month-old-story which we are not currently promoting ourselves, inour top-five most popular stories for the day.

Typically 40% of our Web visitors find us through search engines or links on outside Web sites, so in general this chain of events is not surprising.

But, it does again reinforce that it is readers, not publishers, who are in charge in the online world.