Oct 14 2009
Giving Bloggers New Stats to Be Neurotic About
Technorati has recently upgraded its digs, and with it seems to have revamped the way it does its ranking system for blogs. Gone (at the moment, at least) is the listing that shows the overall ranking for blogs, except for those in the Top 100; in its place, however, are all sorts of rankings in various categories. So, for example, Whatever, whose overall ranking has bounced around between 3000 and 300 during the last year, is currently listed as the #2 book-related blog in all the land, and in the Top 100 for entertainment sites (#41 at this moment, just below Gawker).
And for extra added fun, the rankings are refreshed daily, and Technorati thoughtfully puts in a sidebar for the blogs that have risen the most and fallen the most during the day — Whatever, for example, is a top faller in Entertainment today, having sunk nine spots since yesterday. Oh, you fickle intarweebs — why can’t you love me on a consistent daily basis?!?
As you can see, this is just the sort of stat geekery that can turn you into a neurotic bundle of jelly if you let it, and I’m pretty sure the sadists fine folks at Technorati knew that, which is why they did it. That said, if this sort of thing is important to you, these better-defined stats are actually useful, as you know how your blog fares relative to other, similar blogs. So, well done, Technorati. And, er, thanks for giving me even more blog stats to obsess fruitlessly over serenely consider.
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whatever may be number 2 in the “books” category but it should definitely be #1 in both sarcasm and bacon.
Rabid
BACON! um, i mean… yeah.
Interesting that the number 1 book blog argues for the joy of browsing, and the fear that the electronic age will steal this from us. I would argue that e-browsing is a joy of its own as experienced through the Big Idea.
Amazing. I had no idea other blogs existed outside of my reading sphere. This includes everything ranked above the Whatever.
On the other hand, many of them seem kind of boring.
Oh goodie, and they appear to have lost all my claimed blogs in the process. The ones I spent three hours just this past weekend setting up.
And people pay to play WoW, when there are so many free games out there.
I watch my WordPress Blog views too much as it is.
I don’t need another program to tell me how few people stop by.
In a shameless fit of self promotion. I work at a company called PostRank that does ranking and filtering of blogs. We’ve recently launched an Analytics service to allow bloggers to see where their engagement is happening (eg, through delicious, digg, twitter, etc).
The postrank.com (consumer) website allows you to add your blog to topics and see the relative ranking against other blogs in the same category (or, you can create your own topics to track your blog against others).
So, as I said, I’m biased in that I work at PostRank, but if you want some analytics for your blog, we’ve got a bunch of ‘em for ya.
And all those stats mean jack-all to those of us who aren’t in the top X of any category. Technorati basically made itself useless to anyone who isn’t already a hot property. Of course, they were already falling into irrelevancy for the last couple of years.
This is going to sound snarky, but it’s a genuine question: does anyone actually use Technorati? I mean, for things other than “obsessively checking to see whose is bigger”?
(I say this as someone who uses Technorati solely for obsessively checking to see whose is bigger.)
are there blogs other than whatever, wwdn: in exile, and uncertain principles? interesting. very interesting.
*wanders off to find some twizzlers*