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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
| Blog | Links from blogs | Topic | Weight |
| http://www.engadget.com | 27268 | Gadgets | 0.11 |
| http://www.boingboing.net | 20279 | Tech Culture | 0.08 |
| http://creativecommons.org | 19996 | Open Source | 0.08 |
| http://www.gizmodo.com | 17052 | Gadgets | 0.07 |
| http://www.techcrunch.com | 16873 | Tech News | 0.07 |
| http://www.huffingtonpost.com | 14516 | Politics | 0.06 |
| http://www.todaylink.ir | 13494 | ??? | 0.05 |
| http://www.lifehacker.com | 12894 | Tech Productivity Tips | 0.05 |
| http://www.dailykos.com/ | 11443 | Politics | 0.05 |
| http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ | 10949 | Art/Mystery | 0.04 |
| http://arstechnica.com | 10702 | Tech News/Analysis | 0.04 |
| http://michellemalkin.com/ | 10345 | Politics | 0.04 |
| http://thinkprogress.org | 9549 | Politics | 0.04 |
| http://www.crooksandliars.com | 8601 | Politics | 0.03 |
| http://yanxi.bokewu.com | 8457 | ??? | 0.03 |
| http://www.tmz.com/ | 8343 | Pop culture | 0.03 |
| http://fans.persianblog.com | 8141 | ??? | 0.03 |
| http://googleblog.blogspot.com | 7320 | Tech/Google | 0.03 |
| http://sethgodin.typepad.com | 7101 | Marketing | 0.03 |
| http://instapundit.com/ | 6969 | Politics | 0.03 |
| Total | 250292 |
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.
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.
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.
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Comments
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As a fairly new father I'm very surprised that parenthood/kids don't make it into the top 9 blog topics you outlined.
Reproduction has to be high on someone's list, since it's necessary for our survival, right? Of course, once you have kids, that basically turns into your circle for the next few years of ear aches, rashes and other items :)
Perhaps this reflects that the mainstream hasn't quite adopted blogging-- or that kids take up too much time to do any blogging.
Posted by: John Milan | March 9, 2007 12:59 PM
Alex, Great post...I had a couple of questions. Do you have any idea how Technorati deals with the issue of spam blogs? These are blogs that are just there for SEO optimizers to boost pagerank/links for certain blogs and website?
Also does Technorati treat an incoming link from a non-blog site differently from a blog site?
Posted by: Jitendra | March 9, 2007 1:50 PM
Jitendra,
Great questions... Perhaps someone from Technorati would comment, that would be good to know.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | March 9, 2007 1:52 PM
Good post... lots of interesting info. But the attention we give to the Technorati 100 and other similar "Top N" metrics has always worried me - it's an MSM measurement used on a media ecosystem that is supposed to be new. Not just decentralized and user created, but in many ways fundamentally different. While it's fun to look at this stuff it doesn't really get what blogs are all about - see the above comment on parenthood for example. for a parent, esp a new one, blogs about that are far more important that Engadget.
It would be fascinating to see some information one segments, how these organize themselves and evolve over time. Hmmm....
Posted by: rick gregory | March 9, 2007 1:56 PM
I came across Post Secret a few weeks back at a bookstore. You can think of it as a social art experiment where the sites creator asked people to send in 'creative' postcards anonymously - with the message being a big secret in their life. The secrets aren't typically cryptic, just presented in an artsy way. It's fun yet pretty cool look into social taboos and common secrets. Its great for when you have nothing to do, which is why its probably one of the top blogs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Secret
Posted by: Fahd Butt | March 9, 2007 2:08 PM
I work for one of the web's larger political sites, so I'm supposed to say politics... but I mostly read tech blogs. ;)
Great post, Alex. One thing about the Technorati top 100 is that those links are aggregated over a long period of time. So it's hard to tell what's hot now. For example, in the past week, tech blogs might have gotten many more links than political blogs, or maybe gossip blogs did... but because of the lead that political blogs have build up, they appear more in the top 20.
Another site you could look at is Tailrank (since it tracks more blogs total than Gabe's sites). Their "General" tab is almost always dominated by politics. But I am not sure if that is by design or simply due to the weight those posts carry.
It would be awesome if Kevin Burton tapped into that data to provide some buzz metrics on what type of content is truly being talked about most day to day. :)
Posted by: Josh | March 9, 2007 2:54 PM
Thank you for an excellent summary of a lot of information. Also interesting is the rather spectacular disconnect between what people write about (tech, politics) and what people search for (pop culture stuff). I expect this gap to shrink over time as blogging becomes easier and less the province of technophiles but it's very important to realize that bloggers are not representative of mainstream interests. ... At least I HOPE NOT!?....
Posted by: Joe Duck | March 9, 2007 4:50 PM
It's really interesting how flat the "tail" of the popularity graph is.... I wonder how that looks out to the top 1000 or 10,000 blogs. Are there other dropoffs or is it steadily and slowly decreasing?
But I'm most interested in why the heck there are two persian language blogs in the top 20, and even wrote my first real blog post about it.
Posted by: fareed | March 9, 2007 4:59 PM
A couple of corrections:
Technorati WTF isn't for voting on blog posts, it's for voting on Technorati search blurbs. The blurbs are hosted on Technorati and show up in Technorati search results.
Most people just use the service as a way of promoting their blogs though -- the original intent was for people to provide the best explanation of a popular trend or term.
"art/mystery" is a bit of a poor way to describe PostSecret. It is an art project, but for a lot of people it can be better described as therapy. The secrets they are sharing aren't mysteries but rather the hidden things people carry within themselves.
It's been published to three books now, and has been a New York Times Best Seller.
Cheers
Posted by: engtech | March 10, 2007 1:16 AM
Boingboing is linking to other blogs and sites, so if I would be to blog about it, I would link to the original site (especially if it is one of my feeds) and perhaps the sender for the link, but not always boingboing.
Engadget on the other side is the melting pot for gadget news, you link to THAT to link to the message.
Post secret is a blog I would see rather important because it has "outside reach" as in many people do read it due to the nature of it - I post my secret but nobody knows it is me when I send the postcard in.
Is the value of such a blog or ranking comparable to a site like boingboing or engadgets which are hubs?
You have to keep in mind thoughts like this when you do compare such charts. I am not dissing your analysis btw, just as a comment.
Also Technorati does a link count drop for the statistics after 180 days to avoid the "was there first will never go away" synonym.
Posted by: Nicole Simon | March 10, 2007 3:00 AM
Post Secret was a new one to me ... learned about it from my daughter a few weeks back, when she *asked* to the bookstore to pick up their latest book. It's a crafty idea and a fantastic example of extending a brand from the net to print.
Posted by: Daniel Gray | March 10, 2007 5:52 AM
@engtech thanks for clarification of the WTF.
@Nicole Simon: if you are saying that data is purged every half a year, then the graphs show more of the current picture of what people are linking it. Of course, as you are pointing out it is harder to reason through this for individual blogs. The analysis is meant to do more for averages.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | March 10, 2007 6:07 AM
You initially link to engaget, not engadget... may want to fix that.
Posted by: Offal | March 10, 2007 6:52 AM
They should have added Katrineholm Review to the list.
Posted by: Katrineholm Review | March 10, 2007 7:11 AM
Great post guys. Nice analysis
Posted by: John Furrier | March 10, 2007 7:36 AM
good summary, but I thought it was going to be top 100 topics not blogs.
Posted by: Joost Invite | March 10, 2007 8:19 AM
If you want to see the full top 100 on Technorati broken down by category, see this: What's in the Technorati Top 100?
Posted by: NRT | March 10, 2007 8:26 AM
Interesting graph comparing the three categories
Posted by: March Madness | March 10, 2007 9:29 AM
Well Technorati is completely wrong together with the web surfing mass of this world. I could not find myself even in Technorati Top 10000000000.....
Posted by: Ravenii | March 10, 2007 11:49 AM
@Jitendra, I don't think Technorati's priority is to deal with spam blogs for now. Yes this is definitely an annoying problem but not that grave yet. As a developer, I can instantly figure out a few prevention methods and I'm sure they're gonna focus on this in time.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | March 10, 2007 2:26 PM
Great analysis, Alex. I find it very interesting that two of the top 20 blogs are in Farsi and targeted at Iranians.
http://www.todaylink.ir is a news blog and http://fans.persianblog.com is sociopolitical blog. Both of these blogs are owned by Aria Gostar which seems to be creating a conglomerate of Persian blogs.
Despite low levels of internet penetration in Iran, continuous censorship of political blogs by the Iranian government, and lack of a mature online advertising industry to support companies such as Aria Goster, I think it is very impressive that these two blogs make it into the top 20.
Posted by: Shayan Ghazizadeh | March 10, 2007 3:00 PM
It's an interesting comparison - but is it a fair comparison? Technorati has a lot more analysis tools available than a simple Blog Search from Google. I'm a fan of Google, but there's value in results and there's value in analysis. Technorati provides quite a bit of anlysis - including, my favorite, Blog ranking. As well they have a pretty robust API (that's not being used as much as it could be).
I just built a pretty useful plugin using the API - I don't have anything to work with to do this with Google.
Posted by: Doug Karr | March 10, 2007 3:30 PM
Great post. One thing that wasn't mentioned :
Interesting that two Iranian blogs are in the top ten, I wonder if it will do anything to dissuade Americans of the notion that Iran is a backwards nation where people still live in caves and lock their women in cages. The reality is vastly different, of course, and indeed they are among the top blogging nations.
Posted by: wow | March 10, 2007 6:24 PM
Technorati has some questionable techniques for counting links back to one's blog. For example, I find that many links are stale or completely broken but yet still counted as links. Additionally, it seems rather easy to game the linking system as I've seen at least one blogger who has a few thousand links back to his blog but the vast majority are from a Wordpress theme he's created that contains a link to his blog in the "Theme designed by xxx" credits in the theme footer.
When a ranking system takes absolutely no context into consideration you really have to question its validity.
Posted by: Steve Trefethen | March 10, 2007 10:41 PM
Re: the comment by 'wow' about American's believing Iranians live in caves...sheesh! I don't know who you talk to, but no one I know thinks that about Iranians. We were deluged with information about Iran back in the 1980's and it was obvious then that the country is advanced beyond cave dwelling! There is "intellect" and then, there is what you do with that intellect. All the education in the world won't make up for agressive inclinations. Look at the US! :(
Sorry, I got off topic. My point is, WHY be surprised that two Farsi blogs are popular?
Posted by: webduck | March 11, 2007 12:47 AM
@ Alex
Thanks for the post. FYI I came here via del.icio.us.
@Jitendra
Technorati doesn't do a lot about content scrapers. I see you are on the Wordpress platform and possibly can use this WP plug in:
http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech that i recently installed after I saw a couple of scrapers use my contents.
Regards
Posted by: gje | March 11, 2007 3:57 AM
As a professional writer and mother, my interests--and therefore the blogs I read--couldn't be more different from the most popular sites. Can't tell you the last time I read a linkety-link blog like boingboing, or a political blog, for that matter.
I believe all Technorati has proven/shown is that the majority of people on the net are techie and politico guy types who like to read each other's blogs--which skews the data away from other top ranking blogs in other categories.
Now the question, in my mind, is how can Technorati create a measuring system that actually reflects all the segments equitably?
Posted by: Author Mom DogLover | March 11, 2007 6:27 AM
Thats very interesting. It just goes to show how saturated the Tech niche is for bloggers.
Matt
Posted by: matt608 | March 11, 2007 8:32 AM
My personal favourite blog topics deal with personal development. My personal favourite blog on this topic is Personal Development For Smart from Steve Pavlina, as well as the tech blogs, which come 3rd or 4th in importance for me.
Camille NOW
Posted by: Camille Crawford | March 11, 2007 12:06 PM
Technorati's basic assumptions are wrong.
Furthermore, their expressions of those assumptions are buggy.
More here:
http://www.elainevigneault.com/category/technorati/
Posted by: Elaine Vigneault | March 11, 2007 1:26 PM
Excellent comments here. btw I fixed the "engaget" mis-spelling.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | March 11, 2007 1:41 PM
Hi, You forgot some things like some of those 100 sites aren't blogs and that there are blogs that should be in there that aren't.
http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/2007/03/10/the-consumerist-vanishes-from-technorati-again/
Posted by: David Dalka | March 11, 2007 2:13 PM
Emre: I am biased, so I won't comment on splogs, except by saying that I've often read about people's disappointment in GBS splog-filled search results, as compared to Technorati's.
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic | March 11, 2007 6:02 PM
This is a great article. I love seeing things in graphs.
I only read 3 of the top 100. (ProBlogger, TUAW and Seth Godin.)
The majority of the blogs in my RSS reader are Christian sites and Tech sites. That's what I write on and I guess that's what I like to read. I don't read one single politics blog, either.
Posted by: Shawn Blanc | March 11, 2007 8:41 PM
Shawn, you're banned from Read/WriteWeb... until you subscribe. Go on, make it 4 blogs in the top 100 you read :-)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml (cough, our rss feed)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | March 11, 2007 9:38 PM
Wow, I've never been backed into a corner after commenting before. And for that I'll subscribe and see if your postings are also as clever.
Posted by: Shawn Blanc | March 13, 2007 6:41 AM