Interactive charts of Technorati vs. Google Reader: some insight

Interactive chart: Computers-and-Internet/chart/Technorati-vs-GoogleReader/

Our work-in-progress disclaimer: every source for data on page views, visits, unique visitors, time spent, subscribers, and links is flawed. But imperfect data is better than no data.

Even better: combining data from multiple sources can yield much better data than provided by any single source -- especially after some analysis to understand the differences. Here are some examples. We've narrowed the scope of yesterday's Technorati vs. Google Reader chart to focus on the Computers & Internet category. In theory, there should be a straight-line relationship: blogs that are more popular will tend to have more links tracked by Technorati, and more people who subscribe to their feed. The general trend is (arguably?) visible -- e.g. the bottom right of the chart is empty. Let's look at the biggest outliers.

Slashdot is #4 in Google Reader subscribers (among the subset of data harvested by others and that we consider to be blogs, or "sufficently blog like" to track). However, it's nowhere in the Technorati 100; probably because Technorati doesn't consider it to be a blog. (Fair enough; it's a borderline case.)

What about 6, 8 & 9? These blogs are by or about Google, or about search (by the author of a well-received book on Google). So, it's no surprise that readers of these blogs tend to use Google Reader (and perhaps feeds in general) much more often than readers of other Technorati 100 blogs.

Moving straight down the chart: The Official Google Blog is easily within the noise level expected when comparing different sources, so doesn't really need any special explanation. Still, it's nice to see that the direction of "error" is consistent with the above.

Conclusion: having explained the upper-left outliers, the straight-line trend looks pretty good. There's still more work to be done but that's enough for today.