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.
Mack Changes Stats: A Visit to the Viral Garden
Mack Collier, social media curator extraordinaire, changed the stats this week on which he bases his Viral Garden Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs from my blogging nemesis Technorati to Feedburner, specifically Feedburner subscribers. (Thanks to Toby for the heads up!) For me, this switch produced several ironies….(not in order of importance)
Irony #1
I referred to Technorati as my nemesis because from the time that I began my blog in May 2005 until the moment (unrecorded) that I stopped looking or caring I have had issues with Technorati in the way that they indexed, ranked and provided inadequate tech support.
Feedburner, on the other hand, has been nothing but helpful even in trying to solve issues with Technorati.
This past April I noticed that my Feedburner subscribers seemed to have dropped precipitously….as in they were “0″, none. I immediately panicked and clicked on “help” only to find that since they had been acquired by Google, “help” was now at Google and a bit less accessible than my panicked state required.
Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner (who had been so responsive in trying to solve earlier Technorati issues), is a Facebook friend so I messaged him there. He quickly provided the email addresses at Google that could address my problem. It turned out to be a feed re-direction issue and although some subscribers were lost, the issue has been resolved.
Irony #2
Just a few days ago I had my trustee developer Chris Talkington change my Word Press theme and upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1. He added the Feedburner subscriber widget…..the one that Mack used to base his Top 25 on for the past week. Thank you, Chris….how fortuitous for me.
Gavin Heaton, in response to Mack’s change, asked great questions about the public display of stats…and his commenters responded on this topic as well as the merits of lists in general.
I wholeheartedly agree with Gavin’s statement that, “I think the only way to build links, for the long term anyway, is to create quality content and engage with your community of readers.” Presumably, one’s content is initially “found” by a reader because it has achieved enough Google juice to be visible on a topic search or because of a link from another blog. Ideally this is the result of “quality content” and/or engaging with a community of readers through either your blog or through other social venues, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Therefore, I suppose, the display of stats is not necessary to build readership….on the other hand, truly, most people don’t really like to be the first one to arrive at a party or go into a restaurant where there are no other diners. So maybe there is some comfort in a display of subscriber stats that says the content here is good enough that others want to know when there is more.
I would like to believe that people read my blog/subscribe to my blog because they like the content…..and this leads to irony #3.
Irony #3
There hasn’t been much content, good or bad, on my blog for quite some time. For the first part of “some time” it was mostly about My Unforgettable Mom….and then after she passed away in May it just became about, well…. everything. Even wondering just what it was that I should start back writing about.
So, THIS weekend, knowing that my kids were both going to be away I had decided would be a good time to put all my excuses aside, fire up the procrastinator’s clock and write. But again, what to write?
Thanks to Mack, Toby, and Chris at least for today that is solved.
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
Goodbye Typepad…Hello Wordpress (Beta)
UPDATE: RSS Feeds are currently being fixed and are expected to be fully working by 12am CST tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience.
UPDATE: Most links to this site are now correctly routed. There may still be a few posts that don’t forward correctly so please just search for them on the new blog.
Asking Typepad support for help is like trying to see the Major in Catch-22; you are lead around in big circle but the question is never answered. The Major is never quite in.
The latest: A series of error messages that asked that I report what I was doing when the error occurred. I deligently informed them what I had been doing via the little box provided and just as diligently I would get a response from Typepad support asking what I was doing when the error occurred. At first, what I was doing was not important. On Friday, what I was doing was trying to publish a post. So after filling out the little “tell us what you were doing” form several times, I opened up a help ticket that said “I cannot publish a post.” Thus the all too familiar circle game began.
What were you doing? What was I doing when I couldn’t publish a post? Clicking on publish….
Eventually, I got a semblance of an answer. Something to do with Technorati code. Technorati and my blog are another one of life’s unsolved mysteries. Despite many email responses from Technorati’s Janice Myint I still don’t get their link count and try to ignore it. I have been talking about a move to Word Press for over a year….this seemed like an idea whose time had come.
I have never understood why Typepad provides such poor tech support; but then again, why does anyone?
Stowe Boyd recently blogged Typepad Headache 506 and Typepad Headache 507. I am glad someone is keeping count.
So, thanks to Chris I have made the move and so far so good. For awhile though, this blog design will be a work in process; a beta, perhaps, like the rest of life.
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