A Slippery Slope
Marshall Kirkpatrick comments on the insanity of Technorati's new authority slider.
And, this post at the Blog Herald for another perspective - that blog networks have an unfair advantage in such a system because of the number of inbound links created by the network. Even Kirkpatrick (himself a member of a network) agrees.
Sifry tries to explain in part 2 of his State of the Blogosphere that there is still a level playing field and that anyone can become an "A-list" blogger. He admits that there are network effects and that power law relationships can exist, but argues that if you look at things over time, a lot has changed in terms of the top 100 blogs.
This may be true, but I'd argue that while we may still be in the Wild Wild West period of blogging, things have come a long way in a short period of time. Established networks like Jason and Nick have built, along with the sheer number of new blogs out there (one new every second) make it increasingly difficult to break through the clutter.
Add to that the fact that the network effect generated by the natural buzz around the A-List and the fact that they are a very self-referential group, and you start to get the picture:
This is not the Scripting News blogosphere anymore.
Inbound links to top blog by year:
2002: 598
2003: 8442
2004: 9094
2005: 20,915
Today: 67,731
How is anyone to believe that as long as the top blogs don't compeltely suck out, stop posting, or die that there is any chance of a small-time Z-List blogger breaking into the Top 100 where even the 100th blog (ironically Dave Winer, who was #1 in 2002) has 5,807 inbound links.
Well, it will still be fun trying ...
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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