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Archive for the 'Technorati' Category

Dear Leaderboard, or: Mmmm… Pie Chart!

When Gabe Rivera unveiled his Techmeme Leaderboard a few weeks back, we politically-minded Internet junkies experienced something akin to spending Christmas morning watching another kid open presents. Okay, that’s pushing it. Maybe it’s like comparing your Easter morning haul with a friend who received a Nintendo game, when all you got was chocolate (I’ve forgiven, but never forgotten).

Top 25 sites on the Memeorandum LeaderboardIt made sense, though. The bloggers who show up on Techmeme are much more likely to track themselves on that site than are the bloggers who populate Memeorandum likely to watch themselves. Of couse, all tech bloggers are geeks in good standing, while only some of us political types are. So they get the goodies first.

But as expected, Rivera rolled out his Memeorandum Leaderboard, and he did so this week. As he explained, the Leaderboard

identifies 100 of [the most influential political blogs], ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month. It updates every 20 minutes and offers archives of past days. … The memeorandum Leaderboard doesn’t tell the whole story of course. For instance, influential curators of opinion like Instapundit.com don’t figure highly given memeorandum’s preference for longer articles. Yet it remains a handy portal to many of the sources with the greatest role in framing and shaping the national debate.

It’s handy, all right, and it fills a need. Five years ago, in a very different political blogosphere, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem was the definitive guide to the top political blogs. But with Rob Neppell (née N.Z. Bear) now focused on other projects, it’s fallen into obsolescence. The Technorati Top 100 was a welcome addition, but its inbound link counts were sometimes unreliable, it never focused on politics per se, and as I pointed out last year, the political blogs have to share the top 100 with many other genres. Since then, Technorati has lost its direction in other ways, and it’s too soon to tell whether founding CEO Dave Sifry’s departure will change things. I’m not counting on it.

So while Rivera’s list is worth analyzing, it should come as no surprise that the analysis so far has come from more tech-centric bloggers. For example, here’s TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley marveling at how important the legacy media remains, especially compared to the ’sphere in which he moves:

According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs. … The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.

The observation is fair, but I object to the judgment call. For one thing, defining the subject matter of Memeorandum as “politics” is far too narrow. Foreign affairs, U.S. diplomacy, domestic policy, electoral politics and sundry current events make up the subject matter at Memeorandum — a much broader spectrum of news and analysis than what TechMeme covers. Moreover, these subjects often require reporting from around the country and around the world that even in the digital age aged institutions with more resources than resolve continue to dominate. Most of the stories on TechMeme emanate from the Silicon Valley; Memeorandum spans the world at large.

GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication:

Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.

Myself, I’m still thinking it over. To get started on the process, I separated all the websites on this afternoon’s Leaderboard into a few arbitrary categories and added up the percentages accorded to each. I then created a simple chart with Zoho Sheet (beating out Google Docs by a slim margin and NeoOffice by a much wider one) to visualize the statistical spread. Others will have different ways of breaking this out — and I may have different ways at a later date — but here’s what I came up with:

Memeorandum Leaderboard (by source type) - http://sheet.zoho.com

I should note the numbers taken off the leaderboard do not actually add up to 100%. That’s something I intend to ask Rivera about, and because the Zoho chart rounds them up to reach a sensible 100%, here are the actual numbers as I compiled them:

ARBITARY CATEGORYINEXACT NUMBER
Newspaper/Wire Content 38.65%
Liberal Blogs & Websites 14%
MSM-Backed Online Content11.4%
Conservative Blogs & Websites10.25%
Cable/TV News-Based Content4.7%
Primary Sources Online0.98%
Hard to Categorize Websites0.86%

This dilutes MSM-owned websites only just a bit; as you can see, print and wire-based news stories commanded much, much more attention than websites based on television news, so you can squint and add that back in if you’d like. Add in MSM-created content specifically for the web, and it’s up over 60%. That is also a more arbitrary but, I would argue, more necessary category — “MSM Online” is where I placed any ostensibly non-partisan blog and any non-blog content by more partisan sources. These days established media organizations are creating more and more content for the web, and much of it differs in character from what they publish on dead trees. Liberal and Conservative blogs are more self-explanatory; the hard-to-categorize sites included Drudge Report and The Moderate Voice. The Primary Sources were Gallup, Rasmussen and whitehouse.gov. If anybody cares, I can forward the list as I compiled it. It could probably use some revision, and I certainly reserve the right to have made a clerical error here or there.

I’ll leave you that to chew over for now. I’ll be back with answers when I have them, and with any luck, I will be back inside of a month with a few more thoughts about what all is going on here.

Yes, But How Many Blogs Are There Really?

October 2004: 4 million blogs October 2004: 4 million blogs tracked by Technorati



April 2007: 70 million blogs April 2007: 70 million blogs tracked by Technorati

The latest State of the Blogosphere report from Dave Sifry at Technorati came out last week. He also calls it “State of the Live Web,” which either sounds like he’s trying to get acquired by Microsoft or retiring the word “blogosphere” (don’t tell Bill Quick).

As always, Sifry places great emphasis on how many blogs Technorati is “tracking.” In October 2004, when Sifry first issued his report, it was 4 million. Now it’s 70 million.

In last October’s report — when Blog P.I. analyzed the distribution of blog types in the Technorati Top 100 — it was a mere 57 million.

In that report and (if memory serves) that report alone, Sifry offered a more interesting finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

When you think of how many people have started blogs and then abandoned them, moved from one platform to another, or even kept multiple blogs open for various purposes, 55% is surprisingly high. Regardless, I did the math and concluded that the number of active blogs, using Sifry’s loose definition of “active,” was closer to 33 million.

If we assume that the number is still somewhere around 55%, then there are currently some 38.5 million blogs that meet at least some kind of semi-active status.

Sifry does offer the number of blog postings for particular periods, but he does not specifically include this number in this report — though a German blogger and a French blogger clamor for it in the comments — and he hasn’t previously offered further breakdowns: How many blogs have updated in the past month? Week? 24 hours?

These numbers would tell us a lot more about how big the blogosphere is than the supposedly awe-inspiring but mostly skepticism-inducing count 70 million “tracked.” Yes, we know what Technorati is doing, but since you’re in a position to tell us, how many active blogs are there really?

P.S. Jordan McCullum at Marketing Pilgrim tried crunching the numbers another way:

We know that popular blogs can post multiple times per day, anywhere from 5 to 20—and other active blogs may post only once every few days or once a week. If we took a stab in the dark and said that the average was once every three days (skewed to the right by the high number of “less active” blogs), that would mean that only 4.5 million of the 70 million blogs out there are “active,” or 6%. Seems a bit low, wouldn’t you say?

On any given day? That would be 11.7% of the blogs updated in the past three months. Sounds plausible to me, but only Dave Sifry knows for sure.

Triumphalism in Excelsis

Collected on the Internets, about Sen. Barack Obama, today:

Incredibly Sloppy Thinking

“[C]learly the Facebook organizing is working.” Who said this? No peeking at Technorati!

Consider, the news articles linked above were to the Des Moines Register and Manchester Union Leader, neither of which mentioned Facebook. Neither did the rest of the post. And not to belabor the point, but none of the above mentioned any specific turnout by college students.

Here’s Not Paul Begala and yours truly, just a little while ago:

Not Paul Begala and William Beutler on IM

So, who is actually responsible for this incredibly sloppy bit of blogosphere triumphalism? The answer is embedded somewhere in this post. If nobody guesses (or Technoratis) correctly by Friday, Blog P.I. will provide the answer in this space.

Update: Congratulations to JeffL for correctly guessing (or Googling) the answer. Congratulations are also due to Timothy for finding the embedded answer. You should all feel… like you read blogs too much.

Sometimes They Come Back: Another Look At New York Magazine and Barack Obama

What do Glenn Reynolds, Chris Bowers, Greg Tinti, Richard Bennett, Andrew Sullivan and I all have in common? As Conn Carroll has pointed out, in the past 24 hours, we’ve all linked to an early October New York article as if it was just out. (Though, to be fair, I’m the only one who explicitly said it was the latest edition.)

So what happened here? Let’s turn to Technorati.

The common link in all of our posts was to the fifth page of the article, and Sullivan was clearly first. As my post from yesterday should indicate, I found it on his site. I assume the others did as well, a possible exception being Bowers (being the lone netrooter in the group, and the only one not to mention Obama’s swipe at Daily Kos). How did Sullivan find it? Most likely from one of his ubiquitous e-mail tipsters.

And just to be sure, the story is indeed from October. It’s dated the 2nd of that month, and the last sentence of the article’s first page notes that Obama’s new book “will be hitting bookstores in mid-October.”

Searching for links to the article’s first page at Technorati, it appears the article was largely overlooked. The only well-known site to link at the time was Bloggingheads. That week’s ‘heads, Eric Alterman and Mickey Kaus, barely mentioned it, and none of them singled out the Kos reference.

So why did it escape unmentioned until now? That I cannot answer. This episode might put the lie to the notion that political bloggers will turn up every last relevant tidbit from the news. Or at least that they’ll do so immediately — eventually, it did make the rounds. And, of course, it’s probably of interest only to those of us who spend much of our time in the political blogosphere to begin with. Compare: a few days after the original Lee Bandy report, Joe Biden’s latest “Trent Lott” moment is generating bipartisan outrage — albeit limited, so far.

Back to New York and Obama, credit goes to Central Sanity, who linked the story yesterday for different reasons, and led with:

This article from New York Magazine is apparently about two months old, but it’s still a worthwhile look into the mind of the U.S. Senator from Illinois.

It may be a blogosphere cliché, but it’s still good advice — read the whole thing.

What’s In The Technorati Top 100?

Earlier in the month Technorati founder/CEO David Sifry published the latest of his “State of the Blogosphere” reports. This one doesn’t break a lot of new ground — Farsi edges out Dutch as the 10th most-used language! — but it does look as if the Technorati team has taken previous criticisms into consideration. Numerous bloggers derided the August report as inaccurate (or worse) by counting dead blogs and spam blogs among the exponentially rising number of blogs in the known universe. In this installment

The State of the Blogosphere continues to be strong.

though the curve representing new blog creation finally begins to flatten:

Technorati blog creation growth curve flattens

Sifry says this “may be” the result of improved spam-fighting measures: “Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.”

He also buries the lede by skipping too quickly past this newsworthy finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

As usual the report is not lacking for beautiful charts (some of which I have appropriated for this post) but a chart showing the number of active blogs is not among them. Contrary to the bold-faced boast

Currently Tracking More than 57 Million Blogs and Counting.

there are not actually some 60 million active blogs out there. The number is closer to 33 million, which still sounds impressive even if it too is probably a little inflated, and most importantly, has the virtue of being a useful number.

In the (now mysteriously unavailable) comments on the post, one of the early respondents asked that a future report show what the top blogs are actually writing about, perhaps based on the search engine’s top 50 tags. Anyone can check out the most-used Technorati tags for themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to go down the list and figure out what genres or categories define the Top 100 and count them up.

As you can imagine, that’s quite a list. So here’s the color key for the chart and a sample:

At right you’ll find the Top 10 sites of the 100, current to November 2006. Below, a color-coded key that tells you what each pastel means.
  Technology & Business 30
  Politics & News 21
  Niche/Other 18
  Foreign Language 17
  Entertainment/Gossip 12
  Duplicate 2

 

 
  Technorati Top 10
  Engadget
  Boing Boing
  FC2 Blog
  Gizmodo
  Xujinglei
  The Huffington Post
  Techcrunch
  Daily Kos
  PostSecret
  Lifehacker

Ready for the full list of 100? After the jump:

Continue reading ‘What’s In The Technorati Top 100?’