Author Archives: Jeremy Toeman

When I first registered with Technorati (the de-facto standard service for tracking the so-called blogosphere), I had about 1 incoming link, and my ranking was about 1 millionth.  David Sifry, Technorati’s CEO, gave his “state of the Blogosphere” report today, in which he claimed the site is now tracking roughly 57 million blogs, and revealed the following statistics:

• The blogosphere doubles roughly every 230 days
• As of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day
• The total posting volume of the blogosphere is showing about 1.3 million postings per day

My first reaction: holy freaking crap!  Where are all these blogs?  Does this count every new entry into Vox, MSN Spaces, MySpace pages, and all the other “quick havens” where people get their feet wet blogging?  What are they writing about? 

I also noticed another stat in the report: About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months. Which means, if I do my math, that my blog (with a Technorati ranking of ~22K at the time of writing) is in the top 1% of all tracked, active blogs. 

Here’s where it gets crazy: my traffic and links don’t even come close to 1% of the Top 100 ranked blogs.  Maybe I don’t post enough (thoughts on post frequency here and here)?  More thoughts on Sifry’s post over at IP Democracy.

My second reaction: Really now, where are they?  According to Sifry’s stats, about 40% of blogging is in English (more on language here), which means I should have the ability to discover about 40,000 new blogs every day.  But I don’t see em anywhere.  Sure, every now and then a new blog appears to gain some momentum and link traction, but at the end of the day, the discovery process for new blogs is pretty bad.

Maybe Technorati (or someone else) should introduce new services to get new blogs “on the radar?”  It’d be nice if there was a way to gain some attention, other than hoping/praying that Robert Scoble reads (and links to) one of your posts. Sifry does make a variety of points on the notion of a blogger’s “authority” but, other than by writing some Top 10 list, it ain’t easy to get noticed these days.

Back in the late 90s, workplace boredom often led to Web surfing.  The only thing is, the “discovery” element was pretty tricky, and you pretty much had to rely on word-of-mouth or links from Yahoo!.  Well, with the fun of Web 2.0, we have a bunch of new services that let people help each other find new and interesting stuff online.  Well, maybe not interesting, but at least new.

The top of these social bookmarking (as the term is called) services are Digg, Delicious (now owned by Yahoo), and Reddit (now owned by Conde Nast/Wired). I’ve recently started using both Digg (here’s my Digg profile) and Delicious (more on that in a few days), and find they really can help cure the “I’m bored and I want to surf for 10 minutes” syndrome. With each of them you can track your friends’ favorites and there are a variety of methods to see what’s new or what’s popular.  Only thing is “what’s popular” isn’t necessarily what the term typically implies.

If you want to to know the most popular movies, you can read the box office reports.

Most popular TV shows, Nielsen (which nobody really trusts, but nothing else is out there just yet).

Web sites?  Well, now you have a variety of unreliable services.

But for “Links of the day” you have things like the Digg home page.  Which is built dynamically based on some mysterious algorithm.  In the first era of Digg, the home page was pretty much dictated by the “Top 100” users.  The specifics of how to become a Top 100 weren’t exactly clear, but it basically was a self-rewarding process.  Once in, it’s nearly impossible to get out, and a new user has about 0 odds of getting in.  And the Top 100 were happy. 

Then team Digg decided to change their algorithms, to try to make it a bit more “fair and balanced.”  Sounds good, right?  Well, to everybody not in the Top 100, it’s quite good, as the “What’s Popular” list no longer reflects what they think is interesting, but what the entire Digg community thinks is interesting.  Which leaves the Top 100 feeling a little left out.

I do understand their feeling this way, as they spent countless hours contributing to the site.  Maybe they should have their own special section, or be an automatic filter of the home page or something.  They should get a little kudos and “thank-you” (and not just a T-shirt).  But the site has evolved, and its for the better.  It ain’t exactly a democracy just yet, but we’ll call it a Diggocracy and move on.

Hopefully they’ll work on fixing the “disappearing cookie” problem now…