Blog Wars

The gauntlet has been firmly thrown down by Oh, what a tangled web we weave..., , or has it merely been picked up after I threw it down previously? Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to respond as my PhD thesis has been consuming my every waking moment, but I now have a couple of days respite. The blog readability test that showed my blog to be of a higher standard than the other webometric blogs at the end of November, now shows the Finnish webometrician to be of a higher standard.

Competition between blogs should always be welcomed. It forces us to up-our-game, critically analyse our posts, and the standards of our blog as a whole. Too often the top blogs start to coast, and those have built a following based on well written posts start to fill with pictures of their children's birthday party. As webometricians, competition lets us look more critical at the various tools that are available for comparing blogs and web sites, especially those that don't seem to be working in our favour. It is worth noting, however, that despite my lack of quality posts of late, I continue to lead webometrics.fi in a number of indicators:
Technorati Ranking
Webometric Thoughts - 871,446
Oh, what a tangled web we weave - 2,910,025
Alexa ranking
webometrics.org.uk - 3,816,072
webometrics.fi - 11,904,548
I will take the competition as an opportunity to up my game, but will Oh, what a tangleed web we weave... ?

Dear Technorati, what is wrong with my authority?

I must admit to having an unhealthy interest in web statistics, especially when they relate to my own web site. It is therefore annoying to note that my Technorati authority doesn't seem to be worth as much as everyone else's. Whilst their filtering system allows users to filter the results according to whether hits have: any authority, a little authority, some authority, or a lot of authority; my authority seems to account for little, and my results (for the term webometrics anyway) only seem to appear for people not interested in the authority of the posts.

I am a reasonable person, and wouldn't expect my hard-earned authority of 5 to appear under 'a lot of authority', and maybe not even 'some authority', but surely under 'a little authority'! Especially as others are appearing under 'a little authority' with an authority of 1.

Web statistics are nothing but trouble.

Technorati's most popular blogs: Where are the new and exciting blogs?

The introduction of Techmeme's leaderboard last week engineered a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the usefulness of such lists, and whether the new list was an improvement on Technorati's long standing top 100 most popular blogs (I even went so far as to ponder a few words myself). Thinking about these lists I decided to investigate how the Technorati popular blogs list has changed over the years, after all, if the blogosphere is a vibrant community with new exciting entrants we should see numerous changes and the emergence of innovative blogs...unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case (at least amongst the top 25 blogs).

Looking at the current top 25 blogs finds 13 of them already established in the top 100 of 28th December 2005, and of the other 12 all but three were in existence before 2006. The three 'relatively' new entrants are:
Mashable
icanhascheezburger.com
Peterandrej
...and of these only icanhascheezburger (which is without doubt the most pointless of the three) was established this year.

There could be a number of reasons for the lack of new entrants:
1)The blogosphere is dead (or at least dying), with few new and exciting entrants.
2)Blogs rarely emerge quickly, but rather take time to become established.
3)The lists are driving the traffic as much as they are reflecting the traffic.

Personally I don't think the blogosphere is dead just yet, but with the traffic being driven heavily by the relatively few 'top blog' lists a perception may be given that it is a place where only long-serving bloggers get any traffic and potential new bloggers won't be tempted to join the debate. To encourage growth and participation, maybe Technorati should include a chart of fast climbing blogs.

Webometrics is addictive!

Despite knowing the meaninglessness of many the simple web metrics that can be calculated online and the inaccuracies that are inherent in the different tools available, for some reason I find that I am compelled to look at them.

The lack of inlinks or comments is not very surprising for a new blog. Many of the early posts are feeling one's way, determining what sort of areas are going to be discussed; 'finding one's voice' as the more pretenscious may say. Nonetheless there are already things of note for the addicted webometrician, albeit mostly about the tools themselves:
-Why does Blogpulse claim that I enthusiastically posted 16 posts on the 10th of September when looking at the blog I see I posted twice?
-Why has Technorati failed to index my post on Facebook metrics whilst seemingly indexing every other post?

And most importantly:
-Who is the lone Alexa user who visited three of my pages?


Although Alexa statistics are notoriously hit or miss, as relatively few web users have the software installed and once installed is often labelled spyware, it does allow comparisons between web sites. As an addicted webometrician the ability to compare my own blog with a fellow webometrician's is too hard to turn down. Webometrics.fi:

Unfortunately I lose this time, but it is still early days....and surely this is the smallest margin possible?

A webometrician's woes: Ignorance is bliss

According to Technorati my 'Webometric Thoughts' blog has hurtled up the blog rankings, in fact if it was on an old episode of Top of the Pops it would be this week's fastest climber. Climbing rapidly from position 7,966,799 to position 2,572,229, it can surely only be a matter of moments before the whole of the web is talking about my profound insights into life, the universe and everything!...unfortunately this is not the case, web statistics are rarely that simple, or rather in Technorati's case are even more simple.

Technorati's authority is based on the number of blogs linking to a site in the last 180 days...and the one link that I currently have will soon disappear as is was automatically created due to my support of Blog Action Day, so at the moment of my greatest success I must mentally prepare for the day I become the highest faller in the charts...unless of course I get the currently required authority of 31,619 blogs to beat Engadget and become top of the blogs!