What Happened at the Beginning of 2006?

I got hooked on plugging sites into Alexa a couple of nights ago, and started to see some patterns. Mostly, I saw that a lot of large-volume sites saw their peak at the beginning of 2006 and have been tapering off since, but a few others have grown ridiculously. Notably, Amazon and eBay, and digg and Slashdot follow this pattern. Blogger and Wordpress are growing I guess due to splogs, and myspace and Facebook went up until mid/late last year when they started declining. I can understand much of this intellectually (well, not the decrease in Amazon, which seems still a very useful site), but is there some underlying pattern?

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