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?
It goes back to the definition of authority. Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.
As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.
We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.
With the popularity and pervasiveness of microblogging (a.k.a. micromedia) and activity streams and timelines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing for your attention and building a community around the statusphere – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.
This new genre of rapid-fire interaction is further distributing the proverbial conversation and is evolving online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities.
In most cases attention for commenters at the source post are competing against the commenters within other communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.
Attention is engaged at the point of introduction, and for many of us, we’re presented with worthwhile content outside of our RSS readers or favorite bookmarks. Relevant and noteworthy updates are now curated by our peers and trusted or respected contacts in disparate communities that change based on our daily click paths.
Retweets (RT) and favorites in Twitter, Likes and comments in FriendFeed and Facebook, posting shortened links that connect friends and followers back to the source post, have changed our behavior and empowered our role in defining the evolution of the connectivity and dissemination of information.
Now, we have the ability to instantly interact with, respond, or promote blog content away from the source blog, but that shouldn’t make the original post any less valuable. In fact, while blog authority isn’t capitalizing on these new sources for linkbacks, link authority is still affected, no matter the source, and helps increase the visibility and weight of the host blog in search engines.
The immediacy of publishing, sparking dialog, and receiving responses only reinforces this behavior. And, it encourages participation without having to write a blog post tracking back to the originator of each discussion. So, posts are missing out on a trove of valuable linklove from other blogs that would otherwise have contributed to their authority
Think about it.
There are supposedly 133 million blogs created, with far less in real use today. There are reportedly 175 million users on Facebook and another six million (and growing) on Twitter. The online social populace is necessitating the need for a new generation of establishing and measuring authority in the blogosphere before current blog metrics inaccurately paint a grim picture that they’re influence is declining—again as measured today.
One blog post can spark a distributed response in the respective communities where someone chooses to RT, favorite, like, comment, or share. These byte-sized actions reverberate throughout the social graph, resulting in a formidable network effect of measurable movement and activity. It is this form of digital curation of relevant information that binds us contextually and sets the stage to introduce not only new content to new people, but also facilitates the forging of new friendships, or at least connections, with the publisher in the process.
With the right tools, everything is measurable.
BackType tracks tweets associated with a source URL regardless of the shortener used to link back to it. twInfluence measures Twitter influencers, not just by followers, but also by reach, velocity, social capital and centralization. Retweetist tracks the most “retweeted” people, URLs, and also those who actively “RT” others. Tweetbacks, Disqus, and Chatcatcher are tracking related tweets and directly connecting and listing them as traditional trackbacks at originating blog posts.
FriendFeed already released APIs and with Facebook opening up the News Feed to developers, apps will emerge that can track blog posts by volume of likes and shared links.
At SXSW, Klout will debut a new service that helps bloggers and content publishers measure Link Authority and a conversation index by tracking the frequency of shared URLs tied to the weighted stature of those sharing them compared to other links shared during the same time frame. The service will eventually provide a foundation to compare source URLs ranked within the service over time.
The ideas are abundant.
Shortly before publishing this post, I contacted Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, and we discussed the future of blog authority in the era of micromedia. His response was positive and immediately revealed that the team is actively entrenched in the creation of a modified platform that embraces widespread, distributed linkbacks to blog posts in order to factor them into the overall authority for affected blogs. He also, on the spot, set up a briefing to review where they’re at in terms of development as well as new options to factor into the equation.
Widespread blog responses are dwindling in favor of micro responses.
Authority within the blogosphere demands a new foundation to measure rank and relevancy that is reflective of the real world behavior and interaction of those who are compelled to link back to the post and extend its visibility in new, engaging, and prominent communities.
Blog authority as measured by Technorati is declining. However, blog authority as measured by links is booming. It’s now more authoritative than ever before as bloggers can reach and resonate with new readers outside of their traditional ecosystem to cultivate a dispersed community bound by context, centralized links, and syndicated participation. Microblogging will only grow in importance and prevalence. It’s just a matter of embracing the inevitable and measuring the linklove beyond the blogosphere.
But forget about blogs. This discussion begets a bigger question. Will we need a separate Technorati-type index for measuring the authority of content publishers on Twitter and other micro-media in their own right? Of course we do.
(Photo by Humbolthead).
Technorati does not always have the right stats, remember how their publisher option failed?
And why does your blog has a PR ‘0′. Now come on you claim to be among the top SEO’s of India.
People still care about the Toolbar Pagerank and not about real traffic?
Do you say that you never bother about pagerank? Till now i thought you lived up to your claims.
I am laughing out aloud.
its shame
@James – There’s a reason Amit’s blog has a pagerank of zero. His blog has simply copied and pasted articles from other blogs in the past. I’m not an SEO expert or anything, but I thought that was a no-no.
Anyone and their mom can claim to be the top SEO in their country. It’s not like there are any official standings.
very true.
Very informative post.
I didn’t realize the numbers were that staggering. I’ve been blogging for several years now, and I will have to agree, that one article, post or comment can spark interest to just about any blog.
What is your take on video marketing via YouTube, Photobucket and some of the other video sites?
Timothy Caron
Twitter’s taking over?
I consider Twitter to be an excellent test for bloggers. If you’re blogging for the sake of blogging, and you discover twitter, chances are you’ll stick with twitter because it’s easier.
But if you’re blogging because you have a genuine commitment to it, twitter won’t distract you – in fact, it would probably become just another part of your promotion mix.
Thanks to this, we should see a decline in “useless” blogs – you know the type. The irrelevant single-person social commentary blog, which probably comprises a large part of the blogosphere today.
So as the wannabes discover their message is more effective on twitter, and their blogs die, the race is between the genuine, human-edited blogs, and the automatic spam blogs (which we have detection systems for).
So no, blogs are not losing their authority, it’s just that the faux bloggers of the pre-2009 era are finally beginning to fall away in great numbers.
I’m more inclined to agree with you than with the post. Also, remember that Twitter is more about timeliness and trends — blogs have a LOT more staying power — especially in the search engines. You publish a Tweet or an update, it gets lost in a matter of hours. You publish a post, and you could get traffic months down the road.
I think you’ve nailed it. Those were about my thoughts exactly.
Brian,
Great look at the current and upcoming state of conversation on the web. I had a recent discussion with someone about the subject of de-centralized conversations around content, primarily blogs. I believe the next wave of tools on the web will help us do two important things:
1.) Collect the currently fragmented conversations around a single piece of content and make them a part of a single discussion once again.
2.) Provide ways to measure the fragmented discussions as more of a distribution of the conversation over many services & networks.
Things like Facebook Connect and Backtype are starting points for some of this.
Stand out article. Thanks.
This is what TechCrunch gets for blogging about Twitter all day everyday.
Rather than the blogs competing with Twitter or Friendfeed, I think it could be them competing with one another that is bringing the authority down. You will see a lot of bottom blogs getting far more authority than they used to in the past. This has to be compensated somwhere.
Interesting observation. It sounded like it was all relative and that the tide had just shifted. Whether it is to lesser traveled blogs or other services is something to take note.
So, big opportunity for well written blogs?
Nice, and I agree.
I have a blog, which I used to post to almost every day. With Twitter now, I rarely update my blog. Twitter just works better for me.
Blogs are harder work. People take the path of least resistance. It’s a shame, but it does appear that the low cost of Twitter makes it so much easier to get an idea out there. You get instance feedback, and might write it up on a blog, or might just let the people take the conversation where they want. Blogs have more information, but the focus is never on the conversation. I guess "it depends" at the end of the day.
Exactly – this is why more celebrities are showing up in Twitter: it takes way less commitment than writing a blog entry, it’s way more stream of consciousness-accessible, can be readily tweeted in seconds from an iPhone, has limited exposure/more mystique, and gets more immediate gratification.
A very informative post, confirming my thoughts. As the owner of a relatively new blog (3 months old) which gets more traffic from Twitter than from any other single source I have to say: Twitter is a blessing and a curse for bloggers as long as Twitter reactions aren’t measured into blog authority. Very few readers comment on my blog and even fewer blogs link to it. And those blogs or sites that do link often aren’t counted by Technorati. But the content with links to my blog gets retweeted quuite a few times, so it does create some buzz. Well at least I see that, even if Technorati doesn’t.
Hmm… seems to me this is a reflection of the further fragmentation of audiences away from ‘mass’ media (including blogs) to specific posts/articles, enabled through RSS, Twitter, whatever.
With more and more blogs, there are bound to be more places they want to visit – and link to – outside the traditional destinations. Amazing that we can consider things like TechCrunch as such. Very well done for becoming so!
Interesting point with Facebook, but why even bring up Twitter? It’s only got 6 million users, which is a nice number, but not even remotely disruptive. All this Twitter hyperventilating is starting to get annoying.
The other issue on the numbers is that Technorati is WRONG. I see referring blog sites in my stats package that are not cataloged by Technorati. I have been blogging for about 4 years, and I think that the discovery of links has degraded.
Great post, its amazing to see how this entire information market has been turning and morphing over the past year(s).
This is bullshit!
Sorry, typo. Don’t worry.
Very informative, fragmented conversations and referrals are currently de-centralized but it’s showing signs of evolving. Take Mashable for example they are innovating and bringing the conversation back to the blog.
Twitter, FriendFeed, and other micro communities help further the conversation that is started through a single blog post. While growing one’s readership is something that all bloggers aim for, it should be secondary to the goal of spreading ideas. Blogs, tweets, likes, etc. all seek to add knowledge and information to the community at large. The more paths there are for these ideas to reach across the better.
The world of blogs and citizen journalism is changing amidst our society’s move toward a more connected community. The community’s ability to disseminate the ever-increasing number of blogs and personal websites will help to elevate the content we create and share. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. help us spread ideas beyond our circles of influence. The opportunity to reach millions of people from your living room speaks to the promise of the Internet. Yes, this does lead to an increased amount of noise to wade throught to find the gold within, but it’s the job of the community to make the sure the best ideas, information, and concepts emerge.
Brian,
Great post. One of the best I have read this year on TC.
Good content, whether blog, web site, podcast, video, tweet or Facebook fan page or *whatever* will always win. And Technorati does not track *all* of this content. Who does? Placing my bets with Google. But, Brian, I’m willing to give a try to new start-ups mentioned above. Peace!
Barbara,
Many of the social networks are programmed not to be picked up by the search engines with the “nofollow” or the “noindex” link attribute. However, I agree with you regarding good content, and I do think that this discussion should circle back to the search engines.
Pretty interesting post
Well, I’ve heard it said that you can’t thicken a bucket full o spit with a handful of grapeshot. There are more and more blogs (spit) all echoing the few authoritative sites (grape shot). What do you expect?
Who do you link to when 40,000 others want to and their “informed” [sic] opinion on the latest rumor that Jobs and Gate’s love child is thinking about developing a netbook?
It doesnt have anything to do with twits twitering their smaller but ultimately meaningless messages. There is only so much good stuff out there and its getting harder to find in the sea of spit.
The problem with democratizing publishing is that most people don’t really have a lot to add; but that doesn’t stop the wanna bes from trying and they all register with Technorati.
[deleted]gratuitous suggestion that Techcrunch is buckshot[/deleted]
You have to appreciate TechCrunch for being able to cite trends even if it doesn’t necessarily paint the best picture for them.
best
Chris O.
Referral Key
“Your Trusted Referral Network”
Twitter and friendfeed work better for me too. http://www.frie....com/scobleizer is where you can find me now. Great article.
Technorati is well on it’s way to rendering itself obsolete. They don’t index nearly enough and most of the time, their records for blogs are outdated and wrong.
If you’re interested in a robust measure of Twitter authority (which seems to be the brightest light in the statusphere), I encourage you to check out TunkRank, a collaboration to implement a PageRank-like measure for Twitter that focuses on attention scarcity:
http://thenoisy...og-to-pagerank/
http://tunkrank.com/
Thanks for posting this, Daniel. TunkRank looks like it’s robust against gaming, too, which is a problem I’ve had with other attempts to measure authority on twitter. My sense is that this method of counting our followers, followers’ followers, and so on, while discounting for the number of people our followers and theirs are following, is model that would work really well in any social media environment built from one-way relationships. Great job!
Indeed great analysis here.
Totally agree with Watcher63’s comment above.
Blogging as such is more profound, IMHO, and – yes, it requires more effort. But it makes us think better before we write smth, and bring some real value through postings to the online community. Blog posts are searchable, linkable and in long-term more valuable.
It’s really interesting to have this spelled out with the numbers.
A lot of people are going to read this article and think, “hey, we’d better start looking at Twitter links”, and creating tweetranks and so on. This is missing the big picture: Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, and a hundred different products we haven’t heard of yet are going to create a giant aggregated activity stream that doesn’t have any one home. Like what we used to call the blogosphere, but more immediate and accessible.
Which isn’t to say that blogs are dead: they aren’t. I love blogging, lots of other people do too, plenty more love reading blogs, and if you have the patience and ability to write your thoughts in long-form text, then you absolutely should.
Nice post. Very thoughtful. I think it reveals what many of us were feeling. However, if Twitter, Friendfeed, and FB become the place to discuss blog posts, that may not impact the influence of blogs, but it does their revenue stream.
A social site will never totally replace blogs, but no doubt they’ve eaten into their influence base.
Talk about ‘thinning state of focus’,
and write such a long post…
you lost me somewhere after the CPA paragraph…
A portal site that does not provide turkey enkaliteli quality of wood thank you
John Battelle wrote a good post about the shift of where the traffic and links come from …
http://battelle...ives/004855.php
@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.
I think you will find that a huge percentage of the difference is that Technorati are now using a much cleaner data set.
It is still slightly polluted by blogrolls and theme designer credits, but much less effected by things like your own tag pages, category feeds etc which in the past often counted to your Technorati Authority.
Yes there is a slight trend away from blogging but it is heavily offset by an additional trend to link out more, especially as tools like Zemanta provide ever better suggestions of related content.
Great post. Really well thought out. However, I would also suggest that what we’re seeing in a lot of microcommunities and micromedia reflects that many “former bloggers” just didn’t have the editorial mindset, or came across it far less frequently, once the publishing threshold was lowered by many of these services.
I cannot imagine a thought-provoking post such as yours here even existing without the blog approach — even if a lot of its promotion and commentary will depend on tweets and FB comments and the like.
The Declaration of Independence would have had no where near the global impact as a tweet or FB comment. Today we’re seeing a lot of casual exchange about those items on these networks, but in no way will they ever replace the need for written works of that format to generate the conversations in the first place.
@swag, very well said!
Your post points to the fact that we are now all taking part in a media stream that does not have well-defined boundaries. Your call for better measurement apps that take into account all the different parts of the media stream is quite forward thinking, especially given the tendency to shorten links.
TechnoNobodies is toast that site thought by trying to create the illusion they somehow had meaning fooled many BUT no people aren’t fooled, I stopped using or caring about that site a few months back, then recently bored went in to see why my site has been crawled by them for 200 whatever days and was Banned or whatever they call it. I couldn’t care less I don’t know what their talking about and frankly who cares. The fact is when I started out blogging my originally goal was to eventually be in their top 100 list, now it’s for world domination LOL
Just kidding but that site lost my respect awhile back. I’m the authority over my site I don’t need their endorsement
Peace out Plus I use some Kick ass sites now which is obvious
One of the major dilution factors, as related to the written word and its ability to penetrate the internet audience, is the overwhelming popularity of “social networking” investments. With the vast majority of angel and vc capital being dedicated to social networking ventures, we are effectively supersaturating the internet the options for fragmenting our attention.
I am looking forward to the bulk of investors realizing that they cannot simply mimic effective investors in order to profit from innovation; then perhaps they will spread their capital across a range of markets, and allow social networking technology to evolve in a survival of the fittest environment (i.e. without every competitor being propped up by an unreasonable amount of monetary support).
Should that ever happen, we will be back to a reasonable webscape of entity specific pages, individual blogs, news sites, news aggrigators, search engines, and a handful of actually fun and/or useful social networking sites such as Linkedin, facebook, and twitter.
I don’t spend nearly as much time blogging as I did last year at this time. Mostly tweets of other people’s stuff and my stuff about 10% of the time.
Blogging life is so much better when you quit worrying about traffic, authority, how many posts you do a week, SEO and other stuff that can drive a person insane.
Just do whatever you want, man…
I stopped updating my Blogger blog months ago for this exact reason–I didn’t want to spend so much time writing, summarizing, and posting links to content that already exists out there. Instead I’ve been using Twitterfeed to connect my Digg and OpenCongress actions to my Twitter account and then on to my Facebook status.
I only use my blog for original writings–and it only acts as a back up in a lot of cases…
Great piece–this is a great summary of where social media is headed
good post Brian, really well done, however, there are far too many buzz works for one blog post. its dripping in buzz words and hard to actually pay attention to the content.
Absolutely agree… ‘Widespread blog responses are dwindling in favor of micro responses’ It has become more interesting in Europe to RT than using Technorati or comment on good posts.
What did Axel Schultze comment on my blog the other day… “Reading a good post but leave no comment is like leaving a good waiter with no tip”
Great article.
technorati sucks.
Gartner predicted the end of blogging boom in June/July 08.
Check this link for Gartner Hype Curve predicting that. Thanks.
It seems like this could also be a case of Technorati doing a better job of filtering out splogs from their authority score.
Interesting article. I will continue to blog on a regular basis. I have been blogging 6+ years, so I think I am “hooked” to it, but I will use new types of tools, depending on the format, style, length, etc. The latest thing I am testing out is Posterous. It is a simple version of a blog and you could easily upload different kind of stuff and type of information by sending a simple email.
I’m spending far more time on FriendFeed now than I did on my blog. I find it a much more engaging experience. As I’ve spent less and less time at my blog and more and more time on Friendfeed my Technorati authority has decreased.
I still use my blog to write about longer form items, but even with these, the bigger conversation about the blog post happens at friendfeed rather than on my blog itself.
Great write up and very accurate.
http://friendfe....com/thomashawk
No one can doubt that Twitter has help blogger in a way that it brings traffic faster and sometimes, crazy.
What i do understand is that Twitter is kinda’ sidekick to blogger. A sidekick to make the blog stand out of the crowd.
“Altho its might last for few hours but it worth it; you will feel excited with the jumping traffic”
I did an experiment last month on one of my post
http://www.vmal...ter-background/
I tweeted this post. Some of my fine friends who are top retweeter help me Tweet the link and “boom”
the traffic jumped 200%.
I read one person commented that this Twitter buzz in blogosphere got him annoyed (i agree) but if you know how to utilize Twitter, you are blogging beast!
To start Blogs are not as entertaining as Twitter. In regards to traffic and twittering. I twittered on my Twitter account, guiaslocal and in less than a week I checked analytic’s traffic was up the roof on my start-ups holding page. Also “GM” I’m not a big fan of Technorati either.
Read Barack Obama’s recent stance on blogs… he doesn’t read them…
Blogs linking back and forth to each other is a tired connection. Authority by definition, is a power or right earned by reputation… thus a blog’s power can be earned through intelligent contribution (the blog post or information that’s shared). With the social sphere’s adoption of new networks and micro-communities and the ease of proliferating this information sharing, then the blogs that are referenced gain authority.
Yes, there needs to be greater measurement for these new sources for linkbacks to blogs. As long as user/reader contribution is happening across the social web, the blogosphere will remain an anchor-point for information.
The ‘graph in the middle about CPA and the splintering of attention is the crux of this trend. We need something, to act as a filter between us and the firehose of the internet. I firmly believe that the blogosphere got too crowded, to the point that the signal/noise ratio didn’t support useful information consumption. Twitter got around this by adding a dimension of RIGHT NOW to the picture. It worked for a bit.
But until our consumption is mediated by intelligent agents on our behalf, moving to some new platform will remain the only useful way to move upward in the signal/noise game.
Ben, I skimmed all the way through the comments looking for some common sense about how we can’t read all this stuff. I don’t care if it is blogs or twitter or whatever. Yours was last comment on page and thanks goodness for someone who can see the bigger picture. I predict in coming year we will all be expecting our content to be presented a lot better than it currently is, more visuals to get the point across quicker, and much better ways to access exactly what we are looking for. I see most of this being worked on already but haven’t really found anyone doing something with visuals that we can all use, do you know of anything?
@Pam, what do you mean in this context by “visuals”?
Thanks.