MICHELLE MALKIN GETS DOWN TO THE NITTY-GRITTY IN ABOUT THAT TAIL... when she notes:
"Sifry [President of Technorati] says 45 percent of blogs in Technorati's index haven't been updated within the past six months."Well, excuse me Dave, while I walk backwards while being not enlightened.
Six months, five months, four months, three months, two months... all equal one dead blog. One month is the minimum for a blog to have any sign of life at all. That's the key number. Others would be weekly and daily. Since you can get, via Technorati keyword search, blogs that have updated about two minutes ago, I'm surprised Sifry doesn't come up with some daily, weekly, or monthly numbers.
Could it be that Sifrey's business depends on saying 'This thing is HUGE! Stand back I don't know how big it is going to get' ? I think so. He's running, so far as I can tell, off of VC capital and needs a good story to keep going. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
While the blog growth rate can probably be gauged to some extent, even that, as Sifry states, is open to question because of spam blogs.
It would seem to me that the bare minimum of a metric for a live blog would be at least one posting a month over three months. After all, would we say a magazine was alive if it came out with an issue last July and then another tomorrow? At the least we'd say it was "struggling."
Truth Laid Bear is probably a better system for blogs that thrive, but even there there are problems such as sites that go dark but their links persist in raising them up in the rankings -- i.e. denbeste.nu. Dead sites like that, on every level of the TLB ecosystem keep newer sites from rising up, and the sensation of rising is what keeps new bloggers posting.
The take-away is that there needs to be a system that tells us both the level and the vitality of blogs. Unless we can get this in place, it will cripple ad revenue growth as well as recognition of new arrivals.
When it comes to counting blogs, computers can only do what they do best: count things. We're going to need a Bureau of the Blogs Audit System with real humans in the mix if we're going to take this whole medium and, as the chef says, "Kick it up a notch."
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Update: Sent to Outside The Beltway's Beltway Traffic Jam which seems, somehow, appropriate.
I think you are right when you say that it is the sense of rising in the rankings that keeps many new bloggers blogging. My old blog prior to Colossus I got up to about 500 in the TTLB; my new one has never risen higher than about 3500 or so and usually lingers in the 5500-6500 range. But I no longer care about rankings. I blog for fun. That is the sign of being a more mature blogger, I guess.
There is an old joke. They say you spend your first twenty years worrying about what people think of you, your second twenty years not giving a damn what they're thinking of you, and the next twenty years realizing that they were never thinking of you at all. :-)
I use Technorati to do one thing -- discover who, outside TTLB, has linked to me. It works pretty well at that. But if I worried about where I stood in TTLB, Techonrati, or PubSub I'd never blog.
Posted by: The Colossus at March 17, 2005 08:48 AM