Technorati CEO Offers Graphs Showing Blogs Expanding Influence
Posted on March 31, 2005
David Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, made an interesting post on his blog a few days ago about trends in the blogosphere. In the post he provides a graph that shows some weblogs are starting to catch up with mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN when looked at solely from an inbound link perspective. He also talks about the impact of the top blogs listed in the Technorati 100. The top five most popular blogs have a much greater number of inbound links and much greater influence then blogs in the 11 to 20 positions. The top ten most popular blogs, according to Technorati, are BoingBoing.net (which has 20,915 links from 13,061 sources), Instapundit.com, DailyKos, Gizmodo, Davenetics, Talking Points Memo, Engadget, Eschaton, Binary Bonsai and AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish. The #11 most popular blog on the list, Dooce, has 5,944 links from 5,093 sources -- considerably less than Boing Boing's 20,915 inbound links. The top ten have not changed much since last October, according to Sifry:
Some historical perspective: Last October's chart shows a similar distribution of the top media sites and blogs. Most of the names in today's chart are also in last October's, showing that there is indeed a power law forming around reader attention. Some people might argue that this is a bad thing, because of the implied stratification of the blogosphere. However, I don't believe that this is the case. For example, there are a number of new names in the Technorati Top 100, for example, showing that new voices can make themselves heard.Sifry also provides another graph that shows how significant the conversations are that place among blogs.