Written on March 31, 2008 – 11:07 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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This morning I stumbled upon a site that shows a visualization of the popularity of Spanish bloggers. It’s called Blogocosa and based on data from the social network Bitacoras.com, that has more than 250,000 subscribers. They started tracking the popularity of these writers in January. The size of the images, 30×30, 60×60 and 90×90 pixels, depends on the number of followers each user has on the network.
Blogocosa gives a nice overview of a blogosphere that is totally unknown to me. Apparently Jordi Lagares, Andres Nieto Porras, and Fran J Saavedra are national blogging heroes. I found this link on the personal blog of Dutch social media maven Polle de Maagt and agree with his remarks on the poster. He says the page gives an incomplete overview, since it only includes bloggers from Bitacoras. Moreover, they don’t take expertises and niches in account.
However, it remains interesting to create some sort of ranking. International marketing bloggers already have a top 150 list: The Advertising Age Power 150. The ranking is based on eight sources, like the Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority, Yahoo InLinks, and Alexa Traffic. Although the ranking won’t ever be perfect, most people do take these ranking seriously.
Maybe it’s an idea to start a European Technology Blog Top 100? Hm, I’m gonna take it to the drawing board. Stay tuned.
Written on February 6, 2008 – 6:42 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Technorati currently tracks 112.8 million blogs, an incredible number but also rather abstract. A great many blogs are dead and most are written in a language, most of us don’t understand. Korean, Chinese, Japanese - to name a few. Fact is though that there’s overwhelming amount of blogposts to read. What we see more and more though is a filtering and professionalizing process in the blogosphere. An increasing number of people seems to be joining blog collectives and we’re all getting more serious about this new style of writing.
This has advantages: quality is increasing, people check their facts more often and the journalistic approach (interviews, analysis) is getting more common. Just giving your opinion isn’t good enough anymore. Readers want arguments and a (wo)man with a vision.
A big disadvantage that comes with this development is that the blogosphere might get a bit boring. We think about what we post for a long time. Recently, problogger Darren Rowse summed up 13 questions you have to answer before you post an article. Of course, this increases the quality of post yet thinking processes like this might lead to over-considered articles, in which the spontaneity and guts are gone. I mean, where are the rebels in professional blogging? Don’t we all read Arrington for his no-mercy approach?
Good news for everybody who feels the same way like I do, Utterz is about to bring the excitement back in blogging. It’s a service that allows you to instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas with your mobile. Sort of like an extended Twitter, with more media-types. Utterz mashes the voice, video, pictures and text you call or send in together and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, LiveJournal and MySpace. Next Web Tipr from the UK David Petherick recommended this service to me, check out his profile at Utterz.
Although Wordpress (amongst others) already allows you to send in messages via email, there wasn’t yet a service who made impulsive blogging this easy. Utterz lowers the barrier for bloggers to send in material, which might lead to more raw and interesting material. When you don’t have time for all the regular considerations, something beautiful or exciting might slip through that normally wouldn’t. That will for sure make the problogosphere more edgy and diverse.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
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