Today's Newspaper Association of America (NAA) press release:

Online newspaper advertising jumps 19 percent in 2007

Spending on newspaper Web sites grew to 7.5 percent of all newspaper ad spending last year

They helpfully include a link to 50+ years of data. A more informative summary:

Newspaper print revenue down 9.4%; the worst year on record

Online revenue growth drops below 19% (from 31% in 2005 & 2006)

I suppose one shouldn't hold an NAA press release to the standards of journalism claimed by NAA member papers....

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Hat tip: Editor & Publisher. But, no link from me since they neglected to link to the NAA press release or data. Yet another drawback of the tired old media in comparison to blogs.

For example, Joseph Weisenthal of paidContent.org links to both in his writeup.

Earlier today, Rafat Ali announced some changes at ContentNext Media:

I am stepping out of my position as CEO (something I was never comfortable with, as people who know me can attest...I always liked the Editor and Publisher title better); but will keep the role of Chairman.

Additions & changes:

Nathan Richardson, Chief Executive Officer

• 2007: Country Director of the International Rescue Committee’s operations in Liberia
• 2005-2006: Sr. VP & GM of Dow Jones Online "which includes The Wall Street Journal Online, MarketWatch, Barron’s Online" (source)
• 2002-2005: general manager of Yahoo! Finance

Patrick Dignan, Chief Sales Officer

• most recently with Forbes.com [as] director of East Coast sales for the business website
• previously publisher of Family PC and Saveur magazines
• previously advertising director for Philly.com

Charlie Koones, new board member

• previously president and publisher of Variety

Staci D. Kramer, promoted to Co-Editor and EVP

The board of directors addition is worth a direct quote: "we are expanding our already-strong board to bring on key expertise in the entertainment media sector". (emphasis added) Looks to me like a clue...

Here are some numbers for their Web sites:

#				Blog		T Rank		Alexa		Primary Category
1				paidContent.org		437		23,529		Media News
2				paidContent:UK		15,796		292,892		Media News
3				mocoNews.net		3,701		106,006		Mobile
4				contentSutra.com		28,253		54,074		Media News

ContextNext Media also hosts conferences and mixers.

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Quick update: Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine weighs in.

Whenever anyone doubts the potential of the web to grow new journalistic enterprises, I point to PaidContent.org. Rafat Ali and his colleagues have built an incredible venture that hosts more tenacious reporting than most any news organization I know. I check it more than any other news source I depend upon. Now they announce a bunch of big appointments with big talent. It’s an impressive path of growth managed with cagey strategic care by Rafat.

Earlier today, Douglas A. McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St. posted his list of The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs. Some of his analysis is worthwhile, but the list is flawed. Mac Rumors as #2? Crazy. Drudge Report? I can understand that clueless old-media types may call it a blog, but surely most bloggers agree that it's not. BuddyTV? Not a blog. TravelPod? At best a blog host, but that opens up other candidates that probably weren't considered.

Even ignoring the sites that aren't blogs, I doubt that half of McIntyre's list would make the "most valuable" cut if someone took the time to do a more thorough analysis.

Other reactions:

David Galbraith offers 6 reasons why the list ain't worth a dime. (I don't want to quote his whole post; go read it!)

Mark Evans questioned how much of the valuation is tied to the founders ... though I side with his skeptical commenters.

Commenter Alphanaliste offered some insight on Silicon Alley Insider's post:

Valuations are nonsense unless they are based on what a plausible buyer or (ideally) buyers would pay. ... I'm not being sarcastic; I'm really interested. ... If someone can propose some names, I'm buying it. Until then, this is just a blogger proposing that blogs (including his) are worth more money than anyone has every shown.

With my usual caveat that I take all data sources with hefty doses of skepticism, I've included some numbers below.

#				Blog		T Rank		Alexa		Primary Category
1				Gizmodo *		3		972		Gadgets
2				Mac Rumors		126		9,227		Apple
3				The Huffington Post		4		1,958		Liberal
4				PerezHilton.com		14		748		Celebrity Gossip
5				TechCrunch		4		1,121		Web News
6		?		Ars Technica		7		2,180		Tech News
7		?		Seeking Alpha		245		7,399		Investing
8		?		DRUDGE REPORT		397		1,231		Politics
9				Mashable		9		2,587		Web News
10				GigaOM		36		12,644		Web News
11				Boing Boing		5		4,306		Esoterica
12				Silicon Alley Insider		145		13,216		Tech Business
13				Read/Write Web		14		6,334		Web News
14				Paid Content		437		23,529		Media News
15				Search Engine Land		383		4,783		Search
16				Smashing Magazine		16		3,142		Web Design
17				Dlisted		140		4,224		Celebrity Gossip
18				Daily Blog Tips		205		14,302		Blogging
19				Techdirt		202		25,462		Tech News
20				Neatorama		44		9,872		Esoterica
21		x		BuddyTV		125		4,674		TV
22				The Superficial		129		2,515		Celebrity Gossip
23				Talking Points Memo		58		18,604		Liberal
24		x		TravelPod		128		10,411		Travel
25				24/7 Wall St		5,615		87,612		Investing
Legend
				Blogcosm profile of this blog
				Link directly to the blog
			?	Arguably not a blog (what do you think?)
			x	Not a blog (at least not by our definition)

The New Yorker's March 31, 2008 issue (currently online) includes a long piece by Eric Alterman on "The death and life of the American newspaper".

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money.

Not anymore.

Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.

It seems that all pieces on the future of newspapers contain a passage like this one: (emphasis added)

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from “dead tree” newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of “news” itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity.

Insert "theoretical" or "claimed (but not actually followed)" before "commitment" and we might agree.

Moving on to the future of news, Alterman provides some interesting background and details on the Huffington Post.

Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers—more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid.

Michael Gay of the Lost Remote TV Blog points out that Wikipedia lists many of the site's famous contributors.

Co-Founder and Chairman Kenneth Lerer explains their goals: (commas removed for clarity)

this new way of thinking about and presenting the news is transforming news as much as CNN did thirty years ago.

Alterman's reply:

It's an almost comically audacious ambition for an operation with only forty-six full-time employees—many of whom are barely old enough to rent a car. But, with about eleven million dollars at its disposal, the site is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually.

Rafat Ali of paidContent.org corrects the misleading $11 million "at its disposal":

that’s the amount it has raised [to] date, and probably spent a big chunk of...

Alterman provides a useful comparison of staff levels:

Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the [New York] Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.

Milbloggers (military bloggers) might reply that reader-supported individuals such as Michael Yon have provided far better reporting than the entire Baghdad bureau.

Alterman pinpoints one niche the Huffington Post has carved out:

the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments

(Though I would say "a place" not "the place".)

I've only covered about half the article, so follow the link below for more on:

• some history of "the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press"
• changes advocated by Walter Lippmann & John Dewey beginning in the 1920s
• the rise of conservative alternatives
• liberals like blogger Duncan Black ("atrios") who reject "the myth of the liberal media"
• conservative bloggers who helped to bring down Dan Rather
• Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo on the fired U.S. Attorneys
• big picture: what's next for news?

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Earlier today, one of CNET News.com's blogs posted an interview with John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing.

The industry is really good at direct response advertising online ... which is sub $5 cost per thousand (CPM) for an ad.

We want it at the kinds of CPMs that supported the magazine and the cable industry, which is above $20, $30, $40, $50 cost per thousand.

Here's how:

I just don't think at the end of the day you can get the brand awareness and brand engagement using algorithms, putting (Interactive Advertising Bureau) banners next to content. You can get part of the way there. To get all the way there you have to have the kind of ecosystem that was the magazine business at the height of its expression, where you can really get into that and do some cool things working with the publisher, like (the equivalent of) a two-page advertising spread online.

For more background on Battelle's views, see his March 16 post, e.g.

While technology and ad platforms are essential components of digital marketing's future, they fail to address the core needs of brand marketers: engagement. And they fail to address the core needs of digital publishers: the support of marketers that allow them to make a decent living.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch noticed that Battelle talked about investing in some of the sites that Federated Media represents.

Here’s what I think he really means: They’ll either buy sites outright, or guarantee revenue, or guarantee revenue in exchange for equity. A publisher wouldn’t consider Federated Media an attractive investor versus venture capitalists simply because it would mean tying their revenue to them over the long term.

Ah, there's nothing like a nice fisking in the morning.

Fisk

verb. To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere.

(source: samizdata.net's blog glossary; see also: Wikipedia)

Today's example comes from Daring Fireball, a popular Mac blog. 12 quotes from the Wired article (How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong), 12 replies.

If you don't mind some strong language, read the whole thing.

When Michael Arrington speaks, tech bloggers listen. Today, mixed into a post on other bloggers raising money, he revealed his view of the elephant that is the blogosphere.

I rarely quote such a long passage, but I made an exception here since it's part of a longer post that has a different focus.

And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you’ll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?

Personally, I’ve found that if a fight is necessary, fight clean and fight hard. Make it as bloody as possible and end it fast, with no loose ends dangling about. Leave no lingering emotional stone unturned. When everyone gets up and dusts themselves off, the issue should have been resolved one way or the other, and both sides should be happy to shake hands and tango another day, even if the handshaking is done privately. Those that aren’t capable of doing that tend to push themselves to the outskirts of the blogosphere, where their main job is to lob in attacks at random intervals, pursuing long forgotten insults.

So today, at best, I’d describe the blogosphere as a frontier town with no lawman (I mean, O’Reilly has a badge on, but no gun and no jail). You can do just about anything you want, but the politically savvy folks tend to arm themselves to the teeth and gang together to protect their property. Everyone else is in the middle of chaos, either fighting blindly for attention or politely asking (by linking early and linking often) if they can join the big Gang.

And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don’t link at the right time and in two weeks when you’re pushing your own headline, you’ll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

Luckily, the newbie bloggers are there to fill in the links when they’re needed. That’s why, if you are a mid-level blogger, you are likely courted by the bigger blogs looking to get your support. If you know what’s going on and are willing to play the game, you can see your blog rise very, very quickly. Choose the wrong blog, though, and you may find yourself alone and lonely in your forgotten blog.

Wow. That's certainly not my view of the blogosphere. (In case it matters: yes, Blogcosm is still new, but I've been reading blogs since more or less the beginning.)

I have 2 explanations:

1. there's a reason that the story of The Blind Men and the Elephant is a classic. It captures the hard truth that each of us only sees part of the whole.
2. people tend to project their own views onto others. Arrington sees blogs through the lens of politics and bloody fights, so he assumes others do to.

How much does each contribute? That's impossible to know.

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Some context:

One frequent criticism of Arrington: he posts rumors without fact checking. Today's post is a case in point. Rafat Ali of paidContent.org calls him out:

Mike, Despite your apparent cold war with us, all it would have taken you to get the facts is drop me an e-mail. Instead, you got it wrong on all counts:: TechCrunch reports that our company is looking to raise $2 million to $3 million and that we are also considering selling the company. I can’t say this clearly enough: he is wrong on ALL counts.

For bloggers in fields other than tech: who is this Arrington guy anyway? Answer: he rocketed TechCrunch to the top of the tech blogosphere with obsessive coverage of Web 2.0 startups. The blog currently sits at #2 on Technorati's list of top blogs (by unique incoming links over the past 6 months).

Yesterday, Greg Gershman of Blogdigger announced that the company had been acquired by Odeo. He's joining as VP of Search and Engineering:

Basically, I'm doing what I did here, only I don't have to pay bills. ;)
...
As for Blogdigger: don't worry, it's not going anywhere. Blogdigger will continue to operate as it always has, providing current, spam-free blog search results. You can still contact me with any questions, and we hope to be making some improvements to the Blogdigger services after we've got the new Odeo up and running.

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has more from Gershman:

[As] the blog search space grew more crowded, we tried a few different approaches to keep Blogdigger relevant. One was to expand into various other blog search applications, such as media search and local search. Media search really had the most traction, due to some of the search partnerships we had with sites like Webjay and Ourmedia.

(Read the whole thing.)

Stan Schroeder posts that Mashable will have Gershman on a podcast interview later this week.

Duncan Riley of TechCrunch gives some background on the acquiring company:

For the new Odeo (formerly SonicMountain) this is their second acquisition in just over 6 months, having acquired FireAnt in September.

Odeo posted a note to their blog:

Greg has been working with us as a consultant during the design and development phase of Odeo's new website and we are excited to have Blogdigger's technology powering Odeo's search and content aggregation engine.

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So, what does this mean for blog search in general? Here's some Alexa data:

#				Alexa
1		Technorati		254
2		BlogPulse		30,827
3		Icerocket		37,503
4		Blogdigger		49,933

Despite that people continue to be unsatisfied with Technorati, and have mixed views of Google Blogsearch, none of the alternatives have attracted a large audience. Conclusion: it's actually harder than it looks! I doubt this acquisition will help with blog search; the focus is clearly on audio and video. In any case, congrats to Greg Gershman.

Yesterday we added Technorati and Alexa data to Louis Gray's FriendFeed list. Here's a roundup of what several bloggers on the list have to say about FriendFeed:

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FriendFeed "Launches"

Ok, point taken. There are too many activity feed aggregators out there. So now we have FriendFeedFeed, to "Aggregate all your social networking aggregator feeds into one aggregated feed of aggregator activity feeds!" Awesome.

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FriendFeed Raises $5 Million, Now Open to Everyone

FriendFeed is still very much a work in progress. There is no search box (coming), there is no mobile version (coming), and there is no way to group or organize feeds other than chronologically...Yet there is something pure about FriendFeed that I hope does not get lost as more people (and features) join.

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FriendFeed gets interesting

I love my FriendFeed...Why do I love it? It's one place you can find all my stuff and, even, comment on it.

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FriendFeed, the best software for conversations, raises round and launches publicly

I've been using FriendFeed religiously this year, after reviewing it in detail last month, and I've been consistently impressed.

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Loving My FriendFeed

...it's competitive with things like: Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku and Pownce. And it's simple and minimalist like Twitter, yet it fully embraces everything else out there that has a feed
...
I love to see this stuff finally take root so virally.

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Getting a FriendFeed new friend every minute or so!

Do you think FriendFeed is getting traction? Here is mine.

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FriendFeed Launces, Provides New Lightweight Social Activity. Needs API

FriendFeed is, in a way, attempting to join together the loosely coupled bits of social "exhaust" I produce on the web. And at the same time, they've created another new source of activity that I'd like to pull back onto my own web site. Once the FriendFeed API is out, a whole bunch of interesting stuff is bound to happen.

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FriendFeed Appeals to the A-List and the Entire Alphabet-List

The consensus is that FriendFeed is fun and definitely makes it easier and by far, more elegant, as a way of keeping a "pulse" on your network. The one thing that I need though is the ability to link directly to a "reply" option
...
Lifestreams are not going anywhere but the mainstream.

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Would you hammer a nail with a shovel?

Like anything else it is all in how you used the tools that makes the difference...using FriendFeed means getting involved for a period longer than your coffee break. It means figuring out which of all those friend requests coming in are best suited for making your participation the most effective.

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FriendFeed and the stalkerati

We're in a world where...practicing transparency sometimes feels like a weird blend of the global village and an endless rout of self promotion. And a bit like stalkerati rule, too. Or, at least that's how felt when I read Louis Gray's post reporting on which A list bloggers are public on friendfeed, allowing others to watch their every click and post on their blogs, tweets, facebook and like 30 other social media apps.
...
On a different note, I was irked that Gray's A list of thirty-plus has just two women; on other hands, it's really a list of bloggers he reads, it's really no big deal

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Again: Why I Like FriendFeed

So here's why I continue to like FriendFeed:

The site is easy to use once set up ...
The comments - which I believe are a killer feature ...
FriendFeed is solid and fast ...
Interesting additional features ...
It's sticky ...

Now what's bad?

(read the whole post!)

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From Geocities to Friend Feeds: The (de?)evolution of self-expression and stalking on the Internet

I'm still not sure why/if I need FriendFeed...nor if I plan to use it in the future...but at least I'm not judging from afar this time
...
There are times when I feel technology evolution is outpacing humanity's ability to absorb, react, and evolve as a society. We are probably closer to being "one world" than ever before, yet we are also probably closer to being "six billion individuals" than ever before.

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How did FriendFeed suddenly become controversial?

The real power of FriendFeed, as Steven Hodson points out in one of his signature cranky rants, is in the discussions it facilitates. It’s about participation, not just passive consumption. It is not just a place where you can find stuff - it’s a place to discuss that stuff with your friends.

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Positive Interference

If I'm feeding my updates to a site such as Pulse or FriendFeed, I would rather be able to keep the conversation threads all together on my site or at least tie them together with something like a trackback to pull in threads if the discussion jumps over to another venue. The way Pulse and FriendFeed are built, your readers can never know what additional discussion is taking place which makes it an open loop of dis-jointed conversations that may never come together.

(Note: Ian Kennedy is Product Manager for MyBlogLog, part of Yahoo. As he notes in the post, they are close to releasing a "lifestreaming" feature.)

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Louis Gray Is The Culprit

There have been quite a few tweets, discussions, and blog posts about the influx of FriendFeed friend requests and subscriptions, not to mention a host of new users joining the service.
...
So now you know who to thank (or blame)...

On Wednesday, Louis Gray posted a list of "elite bloggers" on FriendFeed. Here's a look at where they blog, plus recent stats from Technorati and Alexa. Below that: a roundup of some current buzz about FriendFeed.

#			Blog	T Rank	Alexa		Primary category
1			TechCrunch	4	1,100		Web News
2			Mashable	9	2,448		Web News
3			Read/Write Web	14	6,266		Web News
4			GigaOM	36	11,719		Web News
5			Scobleizer	36	21,222		Web Commentary
6			Google Operating System	93	17,274		Google
7			Webware	233	16,693		Web News
8			VentureBeat	252	17,261		Tech Business
9			Between the Lines	290	-		Tech Business
10			Micro Persuasion	323	48,418		Public Relations
11			Scripting News	418	48,679		Web Commentary
12			Laughing Squid	485	32,480
13			Andy Beard	616	23,262		SEO
14			A VC	824	38,143		Venture Capital
15			Loic Le Meur Blog	1,224	42,199
16		?	kevinhasablogg	1,901	265,669		Personal
17			mathewingram.com/work	3,013	96,020		Web News
18			Jeremy Zawodny's blog	3,448	44,219		Web Development
19			Sifry's Alerts	4,237	187,058		Blogging
20			Internet Duct Tape	5,430	79,336
21			Google Blogoscoped	5,458	12,693		Google
22			Silicon Valley Watcher	5,892	224,315
23			Ask Dave Taylor!	9,787	17,330		Productivity
24			ParisLemon	11,269	136,894
25			Deep Jive Interests	11,269	276,038
26			[muhammad.saleem]	11,756	134,206
27			rexblog.com	12,423	659,325
28			bub.blicio.us	13,115	176,738
29			WinExtra	16,176	147,766
30			louisgray.com	17,358	207,186		Web Commentary
31			Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen	20,593	188,354
32			Susan Mernit's Blog	21,736	266,168
33			Newsome.Org	32,949	2,063,337
34			Webomatica	35,986	113,594
35			Ben Metcalfe Blog	37,356	442,270
36			Jeremy Toeman's LIVEdigitally	44,096	381,882
37			The Last Podcast	59,623	659,086
38			everwas	76,073	1,052,963
39			chrisbrogan.com	121,878	2,605,412
40			SheGeeks	437,475	1,769,413
41		x	Techmeme	-	7,422
42			Techland	-	-		Tech Business
		Legend
			Blogcosm profile of this blog
			Link directly to the blog
		?	Arguably not a blog (what do you think?)
		x	Not a blog (at least not by our definition)

(If you have suggestions for the missing categories, send email. Though we'll fill them in eventually.)

Several bloggers have weighed in on FriendFeed:

Duncan Riley of TechCrunch asks: FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why? -- complete with a pie chart ... and an answer by Bret Taylor of FriendFeed in the comments.

Louis Gray replied: Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed

Mark Evans wonders if Louis was "the little shove that got FriendFeed over the ledge".

Brij Singh has a more plausible theory: Gladwell! Your Tipping point is biased in favor of ex-Googlers

Jeff Nolan of Venture Chronicles remains skeptical: "I think FriendFeed is pretty cool, but I still don't know why it's a must have." OK; there's plenty more, but that's a good start.

Carla Thompson of The Guidewire is a fan, but suggests that people pay attention to Constructive Criticism of the service

Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration tied the site to one of his longstanding themes: Edge Principles, FriendFeed Edition

Bob Warfield of SmoothSpan includes it as part of a larger worry: Web Services Not Web Sites: Monetization Just Got Harder

And, that's mostly from people not on the list!

Here's what the "world's 50 most powerful blogs" thought of the list.

(Update: we accidently published this post before it was complete; here's everything we found.)

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The world's 50 most powerful blogs

"Powerful" seems to be a word used here for its succinct headline value...that adjective doesn't fit many of the blogs on the list. But The Observer has made an effort to build a wide-ranging list of blogs that you should be reading...it's very nice to be included.

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Lemons into lemonade

I know, I know, with great power comes great responsibility, so I'm making the promise to you now that I am going to do everything I possibly can to make sure that bacon is served in more public schools.

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#6

Perezzers has just been named #6 on the U.K.'s Observer's list of 50 Most Powerful Blogs. We don't like that word - power - but thanks!

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marbury power

According to The Observer, marbury is the seventeenth most powerful blog IN THE WORLD. I hope you're cowering. ps I have no idea why they think I'm the 'least likely' to ask if Mitt Romney is getting cuter. It's a perfectly good question to ask. The answer is no. But then, how could he?  

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50

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SFT #21 out of "The world's 50 most powerful blogs"

We are grateful and a little shocked, to be honest, but also very proud of the recognition. This is an honor that is shared by everyone out there who has ever posted a photo, sent a video to YouTube, or posted on their Facebook page. This online stuff matters and is noticed, so keep it up!

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The 'W' In 'Web' Stands For Women

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London/Heathrow Gets Ready to Play Musical Airlines

Turns out that I was voted one of the the world's 50 most powerful blogs by The Observer in the UK. Holy crap! That's kind of scary. But, I'm guessing that means I'll have a bunch of new visitors from that side of the Pond...

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Timber, Bookshelves, World Domination, Etc.

It seems that everyone else around here is just too quietly dignified to mention that Crooked Timber has been listed as one of the world's fifty most powerful blogs by The Guardian. But not me. So: Woo hoo!

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Hello Observer Readers

We come in at #34, which is a big thrill, especially so soon after the blog was recognised by Amnesty International. It's all terribly subjective, of course, but it has already brought a lot of extra visitors and links which I always like to see.

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Check out Ronaldo's bubble butt

In case you missed it yesterday, The Guardian (which is quite legit, believe it or not) listed The Offside as 35th in their list of "The World's 50 Most Powerful Blogs." No, I am not making this up.

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Observing the blogosphere...but through a thick fog methinks

Such lists are of course highly subjective and whilst I am happy to see Samizdata numbered amongst new media's Golden Horde, there is a howling error, indeed it is a glaring radioactive glow-in-the-dark omission... where the hell is INSTAPUNDIT?

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50 most powerful blogs...

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 44 Special

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to learn that the Guardian/Observer in the UK named me as 44th in their list of the "The World's 50 Most Powerful Blogs." Rude diners of the world, tremble before my wrath! (Sure.)

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Hecklerspray: The 45th Most Powerful Blog In All The World

Honestly, we don't think we've ever been so flattered. There are some very good blogs in the list, along with a couple of ropey ones. And - if first is gold and second is silver - then what sort of medal will 45th place get us? One made of milk bottle tops? A discarded condom wrapper? Depleted weapons-grade uranium? Hooray for us!

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Observe This

Huffington Post got the number one spot where comments of over 1,000 build up and they talk about things which go way way way over my head... so to have a wee fashion blog even in the list is quite a surprise

Once we had the list of blogs in our database, it was easy to organize by category, just like we do on our blog profiles page.

As with yesterday's post, the index numbers refer to The Observer's list:

On Sunday, The Observer (part of Guardian News and Media in the UK) made a bold claim to cover The world's 50 most powerful blogs. Credits: Jessica Aldred, Amanda Astell, Rafael Behr, Lauren Cochrane, John Hind, Anna Pickard, Laura Potter, Alice Wignall and Eva Wiseman.

Powerful! That sounds like a list worth studying -- so we did. Here's a look in the order they presented, plus the Technorati Rank (based on unique links), Alexa rank (based on page views and visitors) and approximate category or topic.

#			Blog	T Rank	Alexa		Primary category
1			The Huffington Post	4	2,202		Liberal
2			Boing Boing	5	4,253		Esoterica
3			TechCrunch	4	1,100		Web News
4			kottke.org	588	27,828		Esoterica
5			dooce	58	23,533		Personal
6			PerezHilton.com	14	751		Celebrity Gossip
7			Talking Points Memo	58	18,828		Liberal
8			I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?	12	2,505		Humor
9			Beppe Grillo's Blog	11	9,598		Liberal
10			Gawker	29	5,930		Media News
11		?	DRUDGE REPORT	47	1,231		Politics
12			Xu Jinglei (Chinese)	-	-		Non-English
13			TreeHugger	26	13,061		Green Lifestyle
14			Microsiervos (Spanish)	59	6,466		Non-English
15			TMZ.com	13	1,115		Celebrity Gossip
16			Engadget	3	798		Gadgets
17			marbury	-	6,700,700		Politics
18			chez pim	10,543	473,316		Food & Drink
19			Basic Thinking Blog (German)	569	12,967		Non-English
20			The Sartorialist	73	44,005		Fashion & Clothing
21			Tibet Will Be Free	305,717	1,668,550		Politics
22			Jezebel	87	11,558		Celebrity Gossip
23			GIGAZINE (Japanese)	31	3,789		Non-English
24		a	Girl with a one-track mind	11,435	159,652		(adult content)
25			Mashable	9	2,448		Web News
26			Greek Tragedy	25,103	243,137		Personal
27			Holy Moly!	9,787	39,949		Celebrity Gossip
28			Michelle Malkin	50	23,772		Conservative
29			The Cranky Flier	52,048	240,102		Travel
30			Go Fug Yourself	245	17,435		Celebrity Gossip
31			gapingvoid	310	43,925		Marketing
32		x	DirtyDirtyDancing	-	174,602		Photography
33			Crooked Timber	1,242	163,939		Liberal
34			Bean Sprouts	27,355	1,254,617		Family
35			The Offside	6,535	123,838		Soccer
36			petite anglaise	11,925	345,756		Personal
37			Crooks and Liars	44	13,180		Liberal
38			Chocolate and Zucchini	1,253	151,477		Food & Drink
39			Samizdata.net	4,837	109,583		Libertarian
40			The Daily Dish	60	21,418		Politics
41			The F-Word Blog	30,891	335,533		Feminism
42			Private Secret Diary	47,970	3,616,232		Personal
43			Popjustice	14,926	77,314		Music
44			waiterrant.net	5,821	39,031		Personal
45			Hecklerspray	4,609	35,385		Celebrity Gossip
46			WOW Insider	2,584	7,554		World of Warcraft
47			AngryBlackBitch	17,837	1,533,188		Personal
48			Style Bubble	2,681	172,473		Fashion & Clothing
49		?	Blogs | AfterEllen.com	16,405	-		Personal
50			Copyblogger	31	11,696		Marketing
		Legend
			Blogcosm profile of this blog
			Link directly to the blog
		?	Arguably not a blog (what do you think?)
		x	Not a blog (at least not by our definition)
		a	Adult content

Now, every one of these blogs may be interesting, and perhaps even important in their own way. But I see little evidence of power. Even if we ignore that particular word in the headline, how are these the world's 50 most anything? Surely 9 authors could have either come up with a more realistic list, or prevailed upon the headline writer to describe it accurately. (Perhaps: a handful of our favorite blogs, with a few high-ranking ones thrown in to make the list look better.)

The title and premise is an abuse of language. I'm not sure that Orwell would be impressed. Speaking of which ... here's some background on the paper (emphasis added):

The Observer is Britain's oldest Sunday newspaper, and has been keeping readers informed, entertained and, we hope, sometimes infuriated for more than 200 years. It is celebrated all over the world for its liberal values and vigorous campaigning. We are also justly proud of the tradition of brilliant writing that has characterised The Observer, from George Orwell and Clive James to Andrew Rawnsley or Tim Adams or Kathryn Flett today.

Journalism at its finest?

By the way, on 5 of the "blogs", the article linked to the parent site not the blog itself. Gotta love that fact checking.

Blogger Matthew Hurst mentions that one of the projects he's working on at Microsoft was featured at their internal TechFest. (By coincidence: one year after Hurst joined the company.) From the project site:

BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps.

The basic process:

We consume the blog feed from that platform and first identify political (liberal/independent/conservative) blog posts. From those posts, we extract links to news articles and the text in the posts that surround the news links. We apply a classifier to that text, determining the emotional charge. The data is then imported into our database, and the news articles are crawled.

At TechCrunch, Michael Arrington mentions another company that measures emotion, though not for politics:

[This] somewhat reminds me of ScoutLabs, a startup we wrote about last December. Scout Labs helps brand marketers track commentary on their brands, and tries to decipher emotion towards that brand as well.

TechCrunch commenter "km4" notes that it's not a new field:

Microsoft is calling this hard bit “detecting emotional charge.

Everyone else calls it sentiment analysis.

Microsoft…. what an innovator !

(Google shows 78,300 results for the phrase.)

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An aside: blogger Greg Linden joined Microsoft Live Labs back in January.

Last night, Om Malik introduced the GigaOM network's latest blog:

OStatic ... a blog devoted to open-source software, notably the business of it (and the name is a play on “Ecstatic about Open Source”).
...
For this new venture, we have deviated a little bit from our traditional blog model – we are adding a directory that lists about 150,000 software listings. The listings link to either projects, their original home pages, or SourceForge. The new blog also has a “Q&A” section that will allow you to ask questions and get answers from the community. The technology and a lot of the initial content for the site has come via a licensing agreement with Cambridge, Mass.-based VOX Holdings.

Here's the full lineup of Giga Omni Media, Inc.:

• GigaOM - (covers the Web, broadband, mobile & more)
• Web Worker Daily - Future of Work
• NewTeeVee - Television Reinvented
• Earth2Tech - The Business of Green
• FoundRead - The Startup Culture
• OStatic - Find, Evaluate, Collaborate

Valleywag's Nicholas Carlson recently took a shot at Mike Arrington's claim that TechCrunch received about 2.7 million unique visitors per month. Carlson's "evidence": a chart from Compete.com. A quick visit shows their estimate: 870,992 people (shown above). Wow! Off by a factor of 3.

Was Arrington exaggerating? Not so fast. Compete gathers data from multiple sources, but it's not clear that their sample can accurately measure a site such as TechCrunch. Did Carlson bother to think about the chart he posted? If so, does he believe that TechCrunch "uniques" grew more than 8x in 2007? That's unlikely. I'm pretty sure the blog's (impressive) growth came earlier.

To get a quick "sanity check" on the data, I used Compete for the above chart: TechCrunch (in blue) against Slashdot (in red). There's no way the Slashdot data is correct: relatively flat from Jan to June (which I snipped), then a leap from less than 300K visitors in June to over 700K in July. More likely: Compete's methodology and/or data sources changed, doing a better job of capturing the Slashdot (and TechCrunch) visitors who were there all along.

The first commenter ("Truc") on the Valleywag post points out another factor that Carlson should have mentioned:

Compete only measures/estimates U.S. traffic.

Perhaps half of TechCrunch's visitors are from outside the US, so Compete's 871K for the US translates into an estimated 1.74M uniques worldwide. Granted, we need another factor of 1.55 to get to Arrington's figure -- but that's well within the range of accuracy for Compete or any other metric that I've looked at.

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To settle the issue, Arrington posted a screenshot from Google Analytics showing 2,647,027 unique visitors. Of course that number isn't perfect either: some people delete cookies, others read from more than one computer, and some "visitors" are undetected bots. Still, until I see compelling evidence to the contrary, I think that's a much better metric than third-party sampling.