ADMINISTRIVIA AND A QUESTION FOR THE BLOGOSPHERICALLY ADEPT
An unexpected appointment has come up but I will have several posts later today, one will be a follow-up on the China-U.S.-Taiwan strategic situation and the other might possibly be on 4GW.
Question to the readers: Is there a reliable site that monitors/measures the net volume of activity on the Blogosphere as a whole ? I’m interested in looking at longitudinal changes.
July 12th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
Well, people try to track blog posts. The “Truth Laid Bear” (that’s a pun) maintains an “ecosystem” of blog traffic, and “blogpulse” tries to track trends. “4GW” really spiked upward in the last few days. “Technorati” also follows traffic. Most of these agree that Instapundit and Daily Kos attract more traffic than anyone else.
I hope that helps.
July 13th, 2005 at 2:06 am
King of Typewriters,
Hello. You have one of the more unusual sites BTW.
Thanks much. I suppose the blogosphere, still in its infancy, has yet to be quantified like, say , TV watching. While I’m certain that unique blog hits surge during major news stories and wanes a bit on holidays I was looking for hard data to try to look at patterns.
July 13th, 2005 at 3:28 am
Due to the distributed nature of blogging it seems that accuracy and counts will be an elusive goal. There is no standard for tracking blogs and the strong drive for privacy control precludes one from ever being fully embraced.
Many bloggers seem to block attempts to ‘scan’ the activity on their blogs(so as to prevent commenters who only are trying to raise their ranking rather than engaging in the topic – as well as dozens of other good reasons). Other blogs seem to be over counted as a result of multiple aliases.
When you take into account the variety of motivations for blogging it makes sense. Some want to profit (hits/ads/products), some want fame, some want to connect to others, some are clueless about the technology, and others just don’t care.
I find that TTLB, Technocrati and the search engines have a wildly different way of counting blogs. (And they each have different reasons for existence.)
Sitemeter.com and blogshares offer other interesting perspectives (I like the way BlogShares lets me alias my site – but this is a manual process so many sites are inaccurate.
July 14th, 2005 at 6:03 am
Yeah, my site layout is strange. I’m still not certain it displays correctly in all screen resolutions, a must if people are going to read it.
On that other matter, Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal tried to tally the blog numbers in a May 26th article. He seems preoccupied with finding the total number of blogs out there, but does seed his article (it is on WSJ online) with useful links for starting your research.
July 14th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
King of Typewriters
I have added you to the roll.
Originally, when I saw you in my sitemeter and visited I wasn’t sure if you were a blog or not. Then I later realized that part of your site ( about 15-20 %) is ” off-screen” to the right.
Thanks for the article cite. I bet somebody in the IC, probably at the NSA, has some blogospheric tracking set up for which stats would be a byproduct.
October 29th, 2005 at 2:58 am
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