Technorati and me
Last week, Technorati announced that it was now tracking more than 50 millions blogs. Of course, this number has been abundantly quoted — both by bloggers and newspapers, but only a small minority questioned the validity of Technorati’s report (see below for more). In fact, even if these numbers are somewhat biased, one thing is sure: the number of blogs continue to increase as shows how Technorati ranks my blogs. Read more…
Let’s look back for a minute to the Technorati report, which was widely quoted, but not questioned — probably because it has some nice colored charts… Still, some people said the report underestimated the number of blogs because the company is not accurately watching some blogging services in Asia or in France which have millions of users. Others said the number was an exaggeration because Technorati includes millions of ’spam’ blogs and dead — or inactive — blogs. As both trends are going in opposite directions, I will just assume that the number of blogs continue to increase.
Before moving to personal observations, please read this post from Kevin Burton, “Technorati’s Numbers are Wrong.” Of course, he might be biased, being the founder of Tailrank, another company tracking blogs for reporting news.
But he quotes another post from the Data Mining blog which is worth mentioning: “When one looks at population statistics, one doesn’t count all the dead people. Why do the same for blogs? The size of the blogosphere should include a clear description of active blogs.”
Now, let’s look at how Technorati measured the evolution of my two technology blogs in the last three months.
First, you need to know that Technorati ranks a blog according to the number of sites and links pointing to it. The most important criterion is the number of sites linking to your blog. Technorati considers that such a link is valid if it appears on a home page and is less than six months old. In other words, if I have a link to John Doe’s blog on my welcome page — like in my blogroll — and if I mention Doe’s posts once a week, Technorati will only count one vote from me.
So, now let’s look at the numbers given by Technorati about Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends. On May 1, 2006, this blog was ranked as #6,390, with 637 links coming from 237 sites. Three months later, on August 1, 2006, it is ranked as #7,329, with 689 links coming from 282 sites.
And on May 1, 2006, my ZDNet blog, Emerging Technology Trends was ranked as #3,103, with 802 links coming from 414 sites. Three months later, on August 1, 2006, it is ranked as #3,679, with 868 links coming from 488 sites.
Clearly, there is a trend here: more sites are linking to these two blogs while their global rank is decreasing. And there is only one explanation for this: the number of blogs tracked by Technorati has increased.
Have you seen similar trends with your blogs — if you care about of course? Let me know.
Sources: Various web sites and blogs
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