August 10, 2005
State of the Blogosphere August 2005 Part 5: The A-List and the Long Tail
Today I'll discuss the impact of weblogs on mainstream media, the impact of the A-List, and the power of the long tail. You can compare today's report with the one in March 2005 and October 2005.
First off, some terminology and an understanding of what we're measuring. The chart below illustrates a measure of influence or authority of a site or blog as measured by the number of people who are linking to it. Note that this is not a measure of page views or website "hits". Rather, Technorati looks at linking behavior as a proxy for attention and influence. In other words, the more people who link to a site or blog, the more influence it has on others.
As the chart above shows, the most influential media sites on the web are still well-funded mainstream media sites, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. However, a lot of bloggers are achieving a significant amount of attention and influence. Blogs like bOingbOing, Daily Kos, and Instapundit are highly influential, especially among technology and political thought leaders, and sites like Gizmodo and Engadget are seeing as much influence as mainstream media sites like the LA Times. A note on counting: Some organizations with multiple domains or highly syndicated strategies like the Associated Press and Reuters, are underrepresented in this chart, given that their impact is not easily countable using our methods. An interesting statistic to note is the current placement of subscription sites like WSJ.com (the Wall Street Journal). While the WSJ has begun to offer some content outside of its subscriber-only site, the policy is clearly costing them some influence and attention in the blogosphere, as bloggers find it difficult to link to articles in the subscriber-only sections. Also interesting to note is that even though The New York Times and The Washington Post require free registration to view the articles, bloggers are still linking to the stories, and this behavior hasn't changed much in the past 6 months.
More to come later in the week, including all of the underlying data...
Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, search, sotb, sotb2005, statistics, stats, weblog, weblogs
Posted by dsifry at August 10, 2005 9:22 AM | TrackBack | View blog reactionsHmmm... I don't see /. listed in the chart...
Posted by: Frankenstein at August 10, 2005 10:23 AMAn interesting conversation related to this at Shelley Powers:
http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/08/07/technology-is-neither-good-nor-evil/
The timing of you posting is is a little mind blowing considering what I just last wrote there...
Posted by: Karl at August 10, 2005 11:37 AMBloggers link to registration-only articles because they use Bugmenot.
Posted by: Nick Douglas at August 10, 2005 11:52 AMInteresting graph. I've always wondered though how link graphs would rebalance if MSM would actually use links in their HTML. Most sites almost as policy will never link to other sites.
For example CNN will just say the name of the site buty never actually create an anchor to the permalink.
Soooooooooooooo uncool!
Posted by: Kevin Burton at August 10, 2005 3:43 PMKottke made an interesting observation regarding both my own and Davenetics' placement on this list (not that I don't appreciate it, but still).
Posted by: Michael Heilemann at August 11, 2005 12:28 AMDave,
imagine my disappointment when I followed your link for the October 2005 report above only to find the report for October 2004!
;-)
Posted by: Tom Raftery at August 11, 2005 8:15 AMYea I experienced the same thing went to 2004
Posted by: Jessica at August 11, 2005 9:19 AMHi, David,
Would it be easy for you to give us some light about the number of Spanish speaking blogs that your are currently tracking in your database??
We have been long debating about it, as some measures are completely different to others. To give you an example, the "blogometro" (www.blogometro.com) is a Spanish aggregator maintained but three important bloggers in Spain, but they are failing to discover blogs in specific tools like blogger or MSN Spaces. They are currently tracking more than 100.000 blogs in Spanish but they suspect the real number must be quite bigger. In fact, MSN Spaces have stated having more than 1.000.000 blogs in Spanish by themselves (!).
So, here we are, once again stucked with our numbers, and arguing about what the whole number could be. Your help would be greatly appreciated. I thought that as you have introduced in the recent weeks the "search by language", maybe now you could offer some hint.
Thanks a lot for your possible response, and thanks a lot for Technorati.
Posted by: F Polo at August 11, 2005 9:39 AMDear Dave,
Thank you for clarifying the terminology. However, I'm a bit confused by the definition of influence you provide: "the more people who link to a site or blog, the more influence it has on others". Wouldn't it be fairer to talk about popularity instead of influence? For instance, according to the graph above, Yahoo News would be about twice as influential as Fox News wouldn't it? In fact, people link to Yahoo News as a factual, popular source of information. I doubt we can call Yahoo News "influential" however, in the way Fox News or Daily Kos can be for instance.
Some folks, like Scoble, have multiple URL's where their blogs can be accessed from. Could this also be skewing statistics?
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/
and
http://scoble.weblogs.com
