Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?

Ed: @Amit. @Brian. agreed. Technorati’s authority is questionable.

comShare, Nielsen, Quantcast, google analytics, hitwise, and weblogs are also under fire. MIT Technology Review just updated the status.

What may be relevant is that

1. The web is morphing faster than anyone pundit can comprehend. Think blind men and the elephant. The Software Platforms supersite crowd-sources and tracks over 200 platforms like Google Apps, AJAXAPI, MapAPI, etc. That’s probably 10% of the available platforms on the web.

2. User attention is shifting fast. One report shows that social networks, with all its variations like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, disqus, etc has passed email for user time and frequency.

3. Analytics quickly lose relevance. If you can’t see the whole, how can you program the algorythms to track what’s relevant?

4. Without relevant data, how do pundits forecast the future?

Intuition rules in this state of chaos. But with millions forecasting the future state of the web, the chances for anyone to be right declines.

As a past econometrician, we had a saying. If you don’t know the answer, forecast often. If you’re right, tell the world. If you’re wrong, forecast again.

The report on the data is useful. Hope that Brian is not forecasting like past econometricians.

Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?

46 Comments

by Brian Solis on March 10, 2009

Depending on which numbers you source or believe, all reports agree that the blogosphere continues to expand globally.

As the leading blog directory and search engine, Technorati maintains a coveted Authority Index which is considered amongst bloggers as the benchmark for measuring their rank and selling their position within the blogosphere. (At least until recently). Authority in the index is defined as the number of blogs linking to a website within the last six months. The higher the number, the greater the level of Authority a blog earns.

However, a disruptive trend is already at play. While blogs are increasing in quantity, their authority–as currently measured by Technorati–is collectively losing influence. For instance, just last November, Technorati counted 32,493 links towards gadget blog Engadget’s “authority.” Today, it counts half that amount (16,326). Even TechCrunch’s link authority as measured by Technorati is down by several thousand links, yet its relative position in the overall ranking (No. 3) hasn’t moved.

In its annual state of the blogosphere last year, Technorati revealed that it had indexed 133 million blog records since 2002. In March 2008, Universal McCann published a report that indicated 184 million blogs worldwide were created, with 346 million people reading blogs globally.

Blogging is entrenched in the mainstream. Indeed, consumers, businesses, content publishers, and media channels are embracing blogs as a way of engaging existing and reaching new readers to build an ecosystem around relevant conversations. It’s the convergence of dialog and journalism, creating a new generation of interconnectedness between publisher and community.

So why do I believe that blog authority is losing its authority?

CLIP Social Networking Now More Popular Than Email, Report Finds

Ed:

• Good data, wrong conclusions below.
• Facebook delivers as much junk as email. The problem is that email is broken, with good mail going into spam, and bad mail slipping through.
• Social networks multiply as younger groups have pulled older groups into the fold. They are closer than friends - families.
• Facebook eliminates the need to maintain email addresses. Just connect.
• Sharing on walls and feeds is something for everyone to learn more about. Same with open Twitter feeds. Pundits who claim to understand - do they really?

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 9, 2009 9:51 AM 

Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web.

Youth watchers have long argued that for young people, email is how you communicate with elders in formal situations, while social networks and SMS are the preferred method of communication among peers. Nielsen found, however, that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young.

This shift has primarily been driven by Facebook whose greatest growth has come from people aged 35-49 years of age (+24.1 million). From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million)

Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multi-media and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn't appear to be bothering people in the short term. We wonder if it will in the long term.

For a more in depth look at this phenomenon, check out danah boyd's latest analysis titled "Social Media is Here to Stay - Now What?."

CLIP Frozen Google AdSense Stats Continues to Plague Publishers

Google AdSense statistics have been having issues updating since March 4th. In fact, we have seen reports prop up again and again since then. March 6th, people were complaining and people have been complaining since, including this morning.

We have two threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at Google AdSense Help. Each thread complains about the same thing, over the course of the weekend and today.

There are also dozens of threads at DigitalPoint Forums on the issue.

We have no official word from Google on these recent issues.