Lies, Damned Lies...

Break (or feed) the Technorati ranking crack habit

Like everyone else who runs a blog, checking my Technorati ranking has become a daily ritual. But one of the things Technorati doesn't do is give you a history of your site's rank. I'm not quite (not quite) sad enough to write the ranking values down and plot them myself over time, but now I don't even have to. Blotter offers a nifty little chart service which tracks your Technorati links and ranking over time:

So now you can see that my site is languishing in the 200,000s. So still a little way to go before I overtake Scott Adams; but better than the 1,000,000+ ranking I had only a few months ago! And, of course, if you want to see my ranking go up, you can always link to my site...

The chart builds over time - come back and look at this post in a month's time and you should see how my ranking is soaring skywards over that period. There's also a version on my About page.

Top ten geek business myths

There's a great post on Ron Garrett's blog entitled 'Top ten geek business myths', about the lies geeks tell themselves about their startup business.

Many of the entries in Ron's list strike a chord with me from my days getting WebAbacus off the ground.  In particular I remember fretting about the amount of competition (in our case, web analytics companies) already in the market when we started up in 2000. At the time, the major competitors to WebAbacus were Webtrends, Accrue and NetGenesis. Other players like WebSideStory were in the market, but had no presence in the UK.

But it turned out that the presence of competition was a blessing: Webtrends helpfully educated the market (to an extent) as to the benefits of web analytics, but then was acquired by NetIQ and stagnated for several years, leaving a ready-made market of angry customers that we could approach. NetGenesis was acquired by SPSS and disappeared into an abyss. And Accrue, having built their business on the dotcom bubble, imploded spectacularly, taking themselves out of the running.

I can't say that I predicted any of this at the time, so it's difficult to say what the learnings from this were, except that seemingly strong competition in the early stages of a market can turn out not to be nearly as strong as you think. The situation's quite different now, of course, but there will still be surprises as the web analytics market takes its final shape over the next few years.

How to measure blog success

There's a great post over on Avinash Kaushik's blog about how to measure the success of a blog - which entails much more than just measuring traffic. Avinash distils the measurement down to the following six items (slightly paraphrased by me):

1. So what have you actually contributed (how much content have you created)?
2. Is anyone consuming your blog’s content?
3. Are they engaging in the conversation (are they contributing comments)?
4. Are you making a dent in the world? (Are you standing out amongst the 70 million blogs on earth on this day?)
5. Are you getting what you want out of it (money/friends/enemies/job offers/fan mail)?
6. What is the blog costing you (in time as well as $)? Is it worth it?

Interesting to me amongst these are that, as well as measurements of content consumption and (primary) content creation, measuring the level of engagement (i.e. comments, trackbacks) from others is a key measure of a blog's success.

As we at MSN look to help people monetize their Spaces blogs, this kind of measurement is going to be essential - for them, but also to us.

What does the blogosphere look like?

It looks like this:

The picture above is a map of the blogosphere from Matthew Hurst's fascinating Data Mining blog. Here's Matthew's description of the above image:

The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of the graph is that part of the blogosphere generally characterised by socio-political discussion (the periphery contains some topical groupings). Above and to the left is that area of the blogosphere concerned with technical discussion and gadgetry.

Matthew is Director of Research at Nielsen Buzzmetrics (formerly Intelliseek), and co-creator of BlogPulse, from whence the data for this visualisation comes.

This kind of information is very useful for planning word-of-mouth marketing campaigns - as Matthew explains in one of his posts, the blogosphere is characterised by a number of very popular blogs which are linked to by hundreds or thousands of others. So if you want to reach a large part of the blog-reading public, you don't have to advertise on every blog; just find the ones which are linked to a lot - ideally from blogs which are in your demographic.

(Thanks to Mrs Thomas)

So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits

Interesting article in Newsweek about whether Google will succeed with its non-search products, and an interesting counterpoint blog post on why it dosesn't matter.

(Thanks to Slashdot for the heads-up)