Earlier this week Emre wrote about declining
traffic on Technorati and considered the exit options for this blog vertical search
and portal site. The challenge from Google Blogsearch is certainly serious. It is
difficult to compete with Google on speed and breadth of the results. But Technorati is
more than a search engine for blogs – it is also a directory and a popularity site. In
this post, we tap into Technorati to review the current 100 popular blogs. We attempt to
understand what is popular in the blogosphere today; and why.
How Technorati measures popularity
Technorati has a three ways of measuring popularity. Firstly an automated system based
on links from other blogs. This is similar to the original Google page rank algorithm,
which essentially says that importance of the site equals the number of incoming links.
Technorati measures the popularity of the blog by number of incoming links to its
posts.
Another measure of popularity is favorites. Each user of Technorati can favorite any
blog they like. This can be done via a bookmarklet or directly on Technorati site – for
example click here
to Favorite Read/WriteWeb ;-).
Finally, recently Technorati introduced a Digg-like way of measuring popularity,
called WTF. It lets users vote on blog
posts.
Of all the three ways that we described, the automated way is the most robust. The
favorited is probably second best because it lets people who visit a blog and get
familiar with it, then add it to their Technorati Favorites. The digg-like feature is
difficult to take as a measure of goodness, at least for a single post. More time needs
to pass before this voting scheme can really kick in and give robust results. So for this
post, we will only judge the automated measure – but you can deploy the same technique to
analyze rankings by other approaches.
Engadget – the most linked to blog
According to Technorati, Engadget is the top
linked-to blog. Technorati counts 428,199 links from 27,289 blogs, while Google
Blogsearch counts 179,035 links. Here is the Alexa chart showing Engadget’s growing rank
over the last five years.
The next chart is the daily page views. We’ve used Technorati itself as a comparison,
because Alexa now normalizes the data and it’s not obvious what the number stands for. It
appears to be to percentage of the total daily page views tracked by Alexa.
Top 20 blogs
Next we look at the top 20 blogs in
Technorati and analyze topics, distribution of links and a relative weight.
Incidentally, Read/WriteWeb is (as of this writing) ranked number 42 in Technorati
– we’ve been steadily climbing the charts this year 🙂
Two gadget blogs hold first and fourth spot. Strickly speaking, the top twenty blogs
are dominated by Politics. Note that we classified under Technology fairly
different blogs like BoingBoing, TechCrunch and LifeHacker. Still it is no surprise to
see politics, technology and gadgets as the three most discussed
topics. The Blogosphere is expanding to the masses, but the at the heart of it is
technology. Techies love gadgets, so that makes sense too. But politics is actually a
natural and non-geeky thing to be discussed on blogs. People want to talk back at the
analyists on CNN and so blogs are the perfect way to do this.
I also want to highlight two other blogs in the top twenty. First there is an
Art/Mystery blog Post Secret. I am not sure
I get it completely, but it seems to be a blog where artists upload postcards that are
both art and contain an encoded secret. The second notable blog is http://sethgodin.typepad.com, a blog written by
marketing guru Seth Goddin. The blog contains marketing tips and anecdotes and that are
not only useful, but also fun to read.
Next we look at the distribution of links, to see if there are interesting
patterns.
There are two things to note here. First, the number one blog, Engadget, has
significantly more blogs pointing to it than the #2 blog BoingBoing. The second thing is
that the differences between the rest of the blogs is about the same (one exception is
the dip between the 3rd and 4th blogs). This is remarkable and it implies very close
competition. You can also infer this by summing up all the incoming links and then
normalizing individual blogs by this factor – this is what we show in the weight column
in the Top 20 table above (last column). Doing the weight is useful, because you conclude
for example that even though there are 2 gadget blogs and 6 politics blogs, the weight in
each category is about the same.
Top 100 blogs
Finally we analyze the topics of the top 100 blogs. Please note that we might have
missed a blog or two or classified them differently. Also over 10% of blogs we classified
as ‘other’. In addition, we have not listed categories with just one blog in them.
Neverthless, the chart below should give you insight into what is popular in the
blogosphere:
From the chart we can see that Tech is the number one focus of popular blogs. Politics
is second and pop culture third, which clearly gets a lot of attention both off line and
online. The other categories have significantly less blogs representing them in the top
100.
Conclusion
We wrap up this post with another chart, this one from blogpulse:
The data in this chart does not disagree with Technorati (although it does not exactly
match). So it seems like the blogosphere is buzzing about Technology, Politics and Pop
Culture. And of course, gadgets! Please tell us your favorite topics online, since this
is technical blog and it would be great to get non-technical blog pointers.
