:-!

then people will initially think you are an idiot. Then in a couple of months people will start calling you an idiot.

Can I just point out that I’ve been calling him an idiot for years? )

PS. Or here: http://tinyurl.com/oldholborn

So, not entirely done, then? )

I’m confused. Never mind. Forget it.

OK. Your call – but first one more time, then I’ll shut up.

If you are going to run around publicly comparing your “Visits” figures with other bloggers’ “Unique Visitors” figures (i.e., apples and oranges) as you did here:

http://tinyurl.com/vividimagination

then people will initially think you are an idiot. Then in a couple of months people will start calling you an idiot.

Just a friendly heads-up for you. If you are happy for that to happen then just keep on.

I’m done.

I wonder whether football clubs ask the people going through the turnstiles “did you come to last weeks game? If so, I need to note it. Fulchester United is looking for “unique” supporters you see and if you’ve been before, you don’t count”

For info – I agree you are getting much traffic, but the numbers you are quoting are “Visits” not “Visitors”, and therefore not comparable with all the rest.

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2008/12/november-stats-blah-blah-blah.html
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s49friday

Not making any accusations (Cranmer did it as well this month), but last time that caused a “slight dispute”.

If you want to compare with others you need Google Analytics on the blog and to quote their Absolute Unique Users figures: otherwise fiskthrowers will be directed at the door of your shed.

Matt

Is that right? Seriously?

What’s your problem?

I could probably say that 20 political ones are any good – in that I mean they’re a compliment to the MSM commentary and reporting.

I don’t think there is much point in bitching. Most of us are legends in our own lunchtime.

The British blogosphere will follow every other media phenomenon. A few will rise to the top, and then cement their position and absorb talent from others.

There will be a few noted exceptions, but I think group blogs will dominate the next election and beyond.

Yes he was: 55 in politics, 90 in all blogs.

1 – Google Analytics as it is standard, biting my tongue because it gives Goog more information.

2 – The free “Quantised” Version of the Quantcast.com service.

3 – The ABCe audit service based on log files, even though it gives result perhaps 2x or 3x higher than 1 and 2 and costs £2-3k to do.

Of these three, 3 is the worst imho.

Then I would want to explain the method as well.

The current Stats Pariahs are the news magazines. The Speccie publishes stats but not the process used.

Google is far more restrictive in links it “counts” than e.g., Yahoo – and has hundreds of other factors involved anyway, as we all know.

I’d basically agree on Google Blog search.

On Wikio – the other two gems about Wikio are a) That they have a UK-specific service, and b) That they actually talk to us. Aside from that, I’d certainly share some of the points made.

>So, if you’re near the top, you can influence the ranking (probably considerably) of many smaller blogs just by putting a daily list of links in the body of your site.

You would need to ask them.

I’d suggest that number of postings about rankings is a good measure of “degree of tosser-ness”, and that quoting a number without defining how it is defined is an even stronger “tosser” indicator.

>What happens when, due to a ranking system, someone is lauded as having one of the top political blogs, others take this as gospel and the individual goes on to represent him or herself as a political expert or a spokesperson for the blogging community to a much greater audience through various mainstream media?

I’d say that it is difficult to do much about audiences and mainstream media commentators who insist on being idiots – Andrew Spleen springs to mind – I regularly beat them up about statistics, but they still quote “page impressions”. A trench war.

>Maybe Wikio should even think of penalising those who it believes are using this method to influence the standing of other blogs.

That’s an idea, but I’d hate to be the person implementing it.

>Wordpress plugins can identify possible spam by the number of links individual comments contain. It should therefore be technologically possible to identify clusters of links and exclude them from the calculation of a Wikio ranking.

To take an extreme case, I’d probably agree for clusters of more than say 50 links. But – for example – I did this post which had more than 75 links and only covered half of Blogpower:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/07/21/blogpower-roundup-the-matt-wardman-civil-liberties-edition/

While in the huge lists of “Top 300 blogs”, the valuable ones are actually the
lower ones.

>Wikio’s algorithm may not need tweaking but safeguards need to be put in place to stop the possibility of distortion by the inclusion of lists of links in posts.

I think I’d want to see some data on that – e.g., “roundup links” from the top 10 blogs over a 6 week period in the past – to show me there is a problem, combined with an indicator from Wikio of the weighting. I wonder if they have that data?

I’d place the focus on getting all the blogs into Wikio, and perhaps ways of getting more attention to less well-known ones.

That’s bad. Guess I’ll have to try Blogpulse again. TBH, I prefer to get a few more instead of missing them (which is my gripe with technorati), but that’s just too many.

Technorati has always been hit and miss, I’ve found Blogpulse quite good at times.

@BBDO: I’m with Mr Wardman on the value of link cluster posts, several of the blogs I read are just linkbloggers, collating the best of the web. Some do one post per subject, and thus have many many posts per day, others use delicious to do a daily linkdump (I do that sometimes) and others do a ‘netcast’ style thing, which we’ve been doing here since the beginning (well, I say we, Aaron, Jennie et al, not a job I want, at all).

If readers begin to think that linkdump isn’t good enough, then they’ll begin to devalue the blog itself: Dale’s daily thingy is no less damaging than any other method, and he’s been linking to the likes of Dizzy for ages (because he likes that style of blog: there were many much better Tory blogs I was reading at the time, ah well).

Also? Dale’s been promoting himself as ‘top blogger’ since way before this sort of ranking came out, and he’s still repeating the false meme that there’re no decent left wing blogs. That the top ten includes several, and they’ve been there by any sane metric for awhile, shows he’s wrong. Yes, he remains ‘top’, but if we really wanted to here at LC we could take him off there.

We just can’t be arsed.

@Unity: Woopra looks interesting, LMK when it’s out of beta?

And you’d be correct.

Previously, Google’s blog search only picked up links within the main body of an article and disregarded the contents of a site’s blogroll.

Now, every time a new article is posted on a blog it registers every single link on a page, so if you’re on someone’s blogroll you get a new article that’s ostensibly linking to your site showing up every single time some one posts irrespective of whether the article itself links to your blog.

There is a replacement widget which swaps out Google for Technorati, which is less much prone to this issue, but otherwise the signal to noise ratio coming from Google is so poor as to make it worthless, which I why I’ve signed up for and have been running the Woopra beta for the last couple of months, which I’m very impressed with.

http://www.woopra.com/

On word of warning, when I signed up it did take about three weeks for my application to join the beta programme to be accepted – not sure if they’re still handling sing-ups that way but it is worth the wait, not least for the live tracking feature in the Java client which shows you exactly who’se lurking on your blog at any given time.

We must agree to disagree on link clusters.

You refer to my comment about excluding blogrolls. I agree this is a good thing.

My comment about this was to emphasise the importance of links to blogs in the main body of the blog. I wasn’t whingeing that blogrolls were not included

In fact, now that The Mainly Dale may have disenfranchised some of his early supporters by moving his full blogroll away from the front page, maybe he is giving back by providing his Daley Dozen.

Beyond Wikio, one thing I have noticed recently is the WordPress dashboard displaying an increased number of ‘incoming links’.
However, as far as I can see, these are probably from the *existence* of my blog on someone’s blogroll not because someone has clicked on a link.
As you’ll be aware, this feature of WordPress is now based on Google and has been for some time.
I therefore assume that Google methodology has changed (for the worse).

“Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.”

So, if you’re near the top, you can influence the ranking (probably considerably) of many smaller blogs just by putting a daily list of links in the body of your site.

As for not being bothered about lists, well I’m sure many are not too bothered about where their own blog appears but they may well be concerned about the ranking of other blogs.

What happens when, due to a ranking system, someone is lauded as having one of the top political blogs, others take this as gospel and the individual goes on to represent him or herself as a political expert or a spokesperson for the blogging community to a much greater audience through various mainstream media?

We may all then whine about misrepresentation etc. etc.
However, if we ignore how these rankings are put together we will only have ourselves to blame when someone is given a much bigger platform from which to espouse his/her views and attempt to influence others who are not as partisan as the regular readership of his/her blog.

Wikio’s algorithm may not need tweaking but safeguards need to be put in place to stop the possibility of distortion by the inclusion of lists of links in posts. Maybe Wikio should even think of penalising those who it believes are using this method to influence the standing of other blogs.
Until this or part of this happens, in my opinion, Wikio’s worth is greatly diminished but it may well be perceived as a true measure by the msm or even those foolish enough to invest cash to support certain sites.
Wordpress plugins can identify possible spam by the number of links individual comments contain. It should therefore be technologically possible to identify clusters of links and exclude them from the calculation of a Wikio ranking.