State of the Blogosphere ‘08 Released: Who Cares? {About the Report}
You know you have been blogging for a long time if you can remember when Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere meant something and influential bloggers announced its release and listed the results with few questions asked.
A new State of the Blogosphere was released today and things are a little different in the land of Technorati….missing is Dave Sifry, although he did write about the report. Also missing is matter….as in, does it matter?
Technorati is just not reliable enough to be relevant. Tish Grier expounded on this back in July. Mack Collier switched to Feesburner to tally his weekly Top 25 Marketing Blogs. In years past, Techmeme would feature the story and dozens upon dozens of bloggers would be listed as past of the discussions and/or related.
This year, Techmeme has aggregated 5 posts about the report and Marshall Kirkpatrick, who states that the report is a great service and that he appreciates the data, also questions the Technorati conclusion that blogging is “mainstream.” Both Marshall and Mark Hopkins writing at Mashable! use the word “interesting” to describe the data. Interesting.
Duncan Riley, also using the word “interesting” espouses the opinion that Technorati is actually more reliable today than it has been for awhile. Now that I find interesting!
Duncan makes another interesting point, an important point that is a huge flaw in the Technorati data now and in the past; blogging in the classic sense may have “slowed”….He calls it “stand alone” blogging; but participation on social media has not slowed. Technorati does not track social network content sharing…they don’t even track social network blogs.
Technorati says there are 133 blogs. There are approximately the same number of people who visit MySpace or Facebook every day.and share content…..and some of them write a blog, on MySpace, a MySpace blog. Do they know they are not part of the blogosphere? As tracked by Technorati.
There are an additional myriad of niched social networks from Dogster to Saavy Auntie. some with blogs some without but all social. To not track these people in a so called “state of the blogosphere” simply does not track.
Micro-blogging such as Twitter is also not tracked by Technorati. I would float the theory that for those of us who blog and Twitter, the more we Twitter, the less we blog but yet we still “identify” as bloggers. Further, I would say that starting a blog right now almost requires Twitter, if not also a presence on several social networking sites.
So, yes it is interesting to know some stats about blogging in 2008. Stats, not state.
OK, the “State” was always lots of hype and the “number of new blogs” stat never quite made sense; but now more even than in prior years, there just isn’t enough there there to make it important. Interesting maybe….
And I don’t even have to write about method and accuracy of links and pings to know that even if they were completely accurate, that data only about blogs is infinitely limited.
Was the Skype Outage Newsworthy?
Personally, the Skype outage yesterday was a bit disorienting. I use it mostly for chat and only occasionally for phone. But I use it everyday and the outage made me feel a bit out of touch.
Now, I have felt that out of touch/disoriented feeling frequently over the past several weeks as one thing after another that I take for granted disappeared or changed….my Sony Vaio laptop screen got broken and had to be replaced. I had to use my MACBook which was probably a good thing in some respects, but no Particls. Also, no files. Fortunately, I got the laptop back Tuesday.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I moved my blog to WordPress. Feedburner and Bloglines are still messed up. Eventually, I assume everything will be back where it is supposed to be. Oh, Qumana will not post pictures and Faces doesn’t seem to provide a url anymore. Or maybe it is just me.
But, despite my personal inconvenience with the Skype outage, there seems to be some questions being asked about whether or not the Skype outage was in fact newsworthy? As in important past the initial news. Was Skype’s reputation permanently damaged. Is this going to change future behavior?
TechCrunch noted that Ebay who owns Skype lost $1Billion dollars in market capitalization yesterday. I guess that would indicate he financial markets thought it was newsworthy. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan says that whatever the cause of the outage he would “think twice before relying on Skype. tgdaily called it “a permanent wake up call” for Voip vulerability.
Well, I was an early subscriber to Vonage. It constantly went down and customer support was non-existent. The price was right but the aggravation factor was too high. I switched to Charter when they added phone service to cable and internet. Hard to imagine, but although the price was still pretty good, the customer service was worse. I went back to AT&T. Long distance is ridiculously expensive so I use my mobile but at least the phone works and the bill is correct. So far.
All of the phone issues have been annoyances. Voip is buggy. The infrastructure is obviously buggy. But most of us have multiple forms of telephone services….landline out, use mobile and vice versa. However, the biggest inconnvenince to my life over the past few years, personal and business, has been the multiple outages at AmerenUE…..our power company. We have been without lights and air conditioning in the summer and without lights and heat in the winter. And for 2-5 days.
Old fashioned power outage. Now, who do we wake up with that call?
Skype’s outtage was all over Techmeme yesterday and today. It was a top story in tech news at Google news. It made the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It was newsworthy. It just wasn’t fatal.
Tags: Skype, AmerenUE, Charter, Vonage, VOIP, AT&T, NewYork Times, Wall Street Journal, Techmeme, TechCrunch, Particls, Feedburner, ZDNet, Larry Dignan, media 2.0
President John Edwards Delivers the State of the Blogosphere…
A John Edwards presidency may be that moment that we look back upon and say, "He was the first president of the social media age." He seems to "get it." His wife, Elizabeth seems to "get it." I am not saying that just because he was the keynote speaker at Gnomedex. Visit his website and you will see a veritable showroom for social media…not only does he have a blog, he launched it in Beta.
You can receive updates on your mobile device; he has podcasts, he has video. He is using YouTube. Want to know what he talked about at Gnomedex? That’s correct, go to YouTube. He has a blogging family, Elizabeth and Cate. You can chat and there is community.
If John Edwards delivers the State of the Union in January of 2009,
can we expect authenticity and transparency? Will we nod and say, "its
the blogosphere, stupid." Will there be a national dialog on the
question: "Are all links created equal?" Will we need laws that state
that discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, age and Technorati
links is not permitted? John Edwards, if elected will become our first
blogging president; Elizabeth will become the first blogging First
Lady. Pass the Kool-Aid, please.
Tags: John Edwards, blogs Gnomedex, podcasts, videoblogs, Elizabeth Edwards, Technorati, YouTube
Technorati State of the Blogosphere: Depends on How you Define Strong
Dave Sifry released his quarterly State of the Blogosphere data today and declared the blogosphere "strong;" which translates into 34.5 million blogs tracked by Technorati and a blogosphere doubling in size every 6 months. Further, 75,000 new blogs are created daily which he says equates to a new blog being created every second.
He also notes that 55% of those creating blogs are still posting 3 months later. So, where exactly do the 45% show up in the data…or do they? I am not suggesting that the blogosphere is not big…I am just not sure that the reporting is entirely accurate if the 45% continue to appear in the total number. It seems to be similar to the way employment data is reported….when people give up looking for a job they are removed from the unemployment data thus allowing for the conclusion that the economy is getting stronger.
Sifry goes on to say that the rate of posting to blogs, however many blogs there are, is a more robust measure of the growth of the blogosphere. He reports that there are 1.2 million posts per day, or 50,000 posts per hour. Yes, that is indeed a lot of posts. One of the next topics for Sifry to report on is the growth of tags. I am looking forward to that because somewhere in all those posts are my posts and I am still not sure what happens to my tags; sometimes they index and sometimes they don’t.
Tags: Blogs, blogosphere, Dave Sifry, Technorati
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What is Technorati Anyway?
I have posted about the difficulties with Technorati tags and indexing more than I would like to even think about…my problem with non-working tag bookmarklets (yes, these very same bookmarklets worked on other blogs….just not on mine) seemed to finally be solved by using Performancing. I have also found Janice Myint to be very responsive each time I have emailed about the indexing issue.
Having said that, I agree with the statement "Technorati is still broken" that is appearing on many blogs in one form or another. Speaking specifically about the two places I blog, here and as one of the four editors of the blogging and social media blog at blogher (Zadi Diaz,Debi Jones ,and Nicole Simon are writing about video blogging, mobile blogging, and blogging respectively) I have to say that there are problems with tracking updates, tagging, pinging, and even the number of blogs per url.
For Resonance Partnership blog, I found two listings in my own favorites:
Resonance Partnership…Updated 28 days ago and Resonance Partnership by marianne richmond.,Updated 19 hours ago.
Blogher is listed as one of my favorites and on my list, Technorati shows updates 9 hours ago; 9 seconds ago would be a closer guess. As Laura Scott says, "there are 1046 members, 2737 posts and 1805 links. There are constant updates.
Further, I keep a Technorati Chart on my blog that is supposed to automatically update posts tagged blogher.
The graph, Posts tagged Blogher per day for the last 30 days shows blogher tags declining. That is difficult to believe with the number of Blogher blogs and posts increasing.
Get your own chart!
Laura Scott posts the question, "If you built it, and Technorati doesn’t track you, will they come?" and of course for Blogher the answer is "yes". For individual bloggers who are constantly fighting the battle of the tag, the Technorati model is a bit more problematic. As Laura says in reference to the new Technorati Favorites, " Technorati’s latest popularity measure–which is very undemocratic, tends to mainstream traffic, and generally rewards the already-successful."
In fact, in a matter of several days, Technorati first gave us favorites and then after we listed our favorites, we got to find out who was the most favorite…
So to link (no pun intended) two points of this post together: #1 Technorati has fundamental problems with its basic features, tracking and indexing, but instead of fixing the basics they keep adding new features, favorites, most favorites and authority which, by the way in case you didn’t notice, keeps enhancing the dance cards of those all ready dancing the most;
#2 the question of giving Technorati the authority to be the arbiter of the blogosphere because it seems to have one BIG problem that we have all experienced: Is It ACCURATE? Is It BROKEN? Did it ever work? This is the results of Google search for "Technorati is Broken." This is the result of a Google search for "Technorati is not accurate." Most importantly, what do we experience on our own magic middle blogs? How can something so apparently inaccurate measure authority?
As Debi Jones wrote a Mobile Jones and Blogher, What if I told you that there was a part of the blogosphere that claims 56 million members, 2 1/2 times the
traffic of Google and adds 1 million new bloggers per week? Technorati
does not track this part of the blogosphere. If Technorati added feeds
from this group of bloggers, their current "blogosphere" would be a
mere 1/3rd of the total. " She was talking about My Space.
And what is Technorati anyway?
Tag, you’re it….
Technorati Tags: Technorati, Blogher, Authority Google, blogs. blogosphere, favorites, social media
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