Original sentence: As of early October 2006, Google Trends shows a decrease in queries including the word "slashdot" over the past year, suggestive of a concomitant drop in relative traffic.Google Trends shows the popularity of a query relative the total number of search queries, and thus no absolute trends can be derived from the Google Trends graph.It is speculated that Slashdot's audience is shrinking, not only in relation to other sites, but in absolute terms as well.One graph (originally posted as a comment to a Slashdot story) shows that comment volume has plunged since mid-2005
Edited sentence: As of July 2006, Slashdot's audience is shrinking, not only in relation to other sites, but in absolute terms as well.As of late September 2006, Google Trends shows a marked decrease in queries including the word "slashdot" over the past year, suggestive of a concomitant drop in relative traffic.Google Trends shows the popularity of a query relative the total number of search queries, and thus no absolute trends can be derived from the Google Trends graph; over the same period, however, rival site Digg has seen no such decline in Trends statistics.One graph (originally posted as a comment to a Slashdot story) shows that comment volume has plunged since mid-2005,