Instead of lambasting the BBC for the "chilling" effect of its online activities, and blaming the problems of online news sites on the BBC "dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market", News Corp chief James Murdoch should thank the BBC for all the traffic it sends his way.

The BBC is responsible for about 870,000 visitors a month to Times Online and 1.1 million to thesun.co.uk (see methodology, below).

The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).

I've written a guest post for econsultancy, entitled: Murdoch CAN charge for content online, but can anyone else?

There are more than 100,000 citations on Wikipedia that reference the Guardian - more than twice as much as any other UK national newspaper. The FT is way down the list - barely higher than the Sun.

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. And 62.8% of users look at just one page. Only the Sun (4 pages/day per user), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) come out above average in terms of daily page views per user.

Overall, Google drives the most US traffic to the nine UK national newspaper sites - 19.1%. News aggregator Drudgereport.com is the 2nd highest source of US traffic. Next is Yahoo at 5.2%, with Facebook 4th at 1.6%.

With 981,359 followers, @Guardiantech is closing in on a million, as I reveal the latest figures for UK newspaper Twitter accounts. @GuardianTech has jumped 150,000 followers in a month. @TimesFashion (29,190 followers) has moved up one place to 2nd, overtaking @GuardianNews (27,802) which is now 3rd.

On average, US traffic to UK newspaper sites is 36.8% of the UK traffic. The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it's a massive 62.5%.

By making use of ABCe data, we can check what Alexa says with the official audited data for UK newspapers. As the table shows, it's OK but not brilliant.

Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian's URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months - way more than any other UK newspaper.

The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they're not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts - with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. The Guardian's the clear Twitter winner, as it's place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers - 78% of the total ...

The latest subscriber figures (see table below) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it's time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to something else. Like Twitter.

Newspaper websites are failing in some obvious ways to make their stories readable. Too many are using small fonts, long off-putting paragraphs, no subheadings, no in-content boxes or pictures, and no in-content links.

20 minutes after the Englang game finished at 9.55pm, half the major UK newspaper sites hadn't published the results.

Newspaper sites did very badly at linking to google's new street view service.

News sites are bad at linking out. Which of them managed to link to charity site rednoseday.com on its big day - and which failed to make mentions into proper hyperlinks.

When it comes to Fark, it's the Sun wots winning it. The Guardian come second - and yet again, the FT, Mirror and Express come last.

The Guardian has had more stores submitted to Reddit, the user-submitted news site, than any other UK newspaper website.

The Daily Telegraph has had more stories submitted to Digg, the social news website for sharing content, than any other UK newspaper site.

Which newspapers are stumbled a lot - and which are not ...