Careful with Those Stats, Eugene

On page 187 of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail (I'm talking about the book but linking to the blog), a familiar graph appears. It is Technorati's ranked list of sites showing a mixture of MSM and blogs. The claim here is that there are some blogs (BoingBoing, Engadget, PostSecret, Dialy Kos) whose popularity rivals the MSM sites (New York Times, CNN, etc.)

There is a fundamental problem with this stuff. A while back, most likely due to issues with RSS, Technorati switched from claiming how many blogs they crawled, to how many 'sites'. The data that Anderson presents suggests that these blogs rival the MSM sites in terms of counts of inlinks from 'other sites.' Does he mean web sites as we know them or these new 'sites' that Technorati counts?

For example, the New York Times as, according to Google, around 14 MM references. Technorati counts approximately 0.5 MM. BoingBoing, on the Technorati graph, is bordered by Wired (G: 1MM, T: 0.1 MM) and boston.com (G: 5MM, T: 0.08 MM). BoingBoing itself has 0.07MM hits on Technorati and 0.4 MM on Google.

So when is a site a site a site? (snowclone!)

Comments

[Max Kalehof]

Matt,
You're right. But it will become harder to distinguish between publisher sites and blogs over times. This will be especially true with news sites.

Max

[Matthew Hurst]

Max,

I believe that the time when this

http://www.nytimes.com

and this

http://www.instpundit.com

look the same is a long way off.

Anyway - the point here is that the stats/claims are misleading.