Blogging is alive and well

This month’s Wired has an article title ‘Kill Your Blog’ – it’s a great article. Great, that is, as an example of poor writing, logic, journalism, etc. It’s written by Paul Boutin for Valleywag, so it may be complete fiction. The basic theme of the article is: blogging has been overwhelmed by corporate content (that, or blogs have become corporations), so little-guy blogging is a waste of time – you will never be heard.

Keeping with the great tradition of blog-o-journalism, Paul uses examples of Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble as evidence of what is happening in the blogosphere. This is like comparing Larry Ellison’s mega-yachts to a second hand row boat you are thinking of buying on cragslist – i.e. not an exemplar for the population.

Boutin also uses the Technorati 100 list as evidence for something being wrong with the blogosphere, and random, obnoxious comments left on posts as reasons to stop writing. The attitude seems to be – let’s have everything stay the same and wait for bit rot to set in then claim the space to be done with.

Personally, I found the article to be a perfect list of reasons to do something really useful with social media: again, Google’s blogsearch is the thin end of the thin end of the wedge, as is Political Streams.

Sigh, I know Wired’s there to sell copy and one way to do this is to be crazy and controversial – but this is just lame.

Comments

[Flea Circus Research Library]

Out of all the blogs I follow (49 at current count) only a handful of them are corporate e.g. BBC News, Slashdot and Amazon Associates. Two of them are feeds based on blog searches for Flea Circuses. The others are written by real people who write articles maybe one a week. I appreciate the shorter articles with the longer ones often being ignored, the slashdot articles are nearly all ignored and I use their links to read the origional articles.

The problem with the Technorati list is it's showing blogs for bloggers, i.e. You could have a lot of people who read your list who don't actually write their own blogs or write blogs on a different topic and hence will never reference you.

The other thing is quality of readership. On the Flea Circus Research Library blog I'd rather have a handful of people who are interested in the material rather than a few 1000 people who just want a flame war. Ok so that means less advertising revenue but is that really why I'm blogging? The answer is no of course!

[Dean Abbott]

Apparently I'm like "Flea"--nearly all of the blogs I track are written by knowledgeable individuals rather than "corporate content". Is it hard to find interesting blogs on topics of interest to me? Not at all. I found this post with a simple google blog search with keywords...get this..."data mining". (I already have you among my RSS feeds, but hadn't seen this post yet).

Putting on our data mining hats...what percentage of the total blog hits are covered by the Technorati 100? I would guess that while these are the most popular, they are a very very small percentage of the total hits, so in the end, is not a good representation of the reach of the blogosphere.

[Flea Circus Research Library]

According to Technorati's own page, 346 million world wide read blogs.

http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

I can't find readers for the top two but TechCrunch the number 3 page claims to have 1233K readers i.e. 1.2M. So using some questionable mathematics, 100x1.2m/346m suggests the technorati top 100 consumes about 1/3 of all readers.

There's a couple of issues with this. The first is that it could actually be the same 1.2M who read all of those top 100 blogs pushing them down to about 3% of all readers. The other flaw to these numbers is just because an article is downloaded onto a computer, does not mean that someone actually read it.

So my conclusion from this is that the technorati top 100 consumes between 3% and 33% of all the sheep blog readers leaving the rest of the intelegent readers left to read our blogs.

Andy aka FleaCircusDirector from the Flea Circus Research Library