David Sifry, the CEO of popular blog search engine Technorati, has released Part 2 to the State of the Blogosphere Part 1 release last week. Dave addresses the change of the online landscape and explains how some blogs are gaining more attention than some major mainstream media sites. Blogs like Boing Boing, Engadget and PostSecret are hanging with some respectable mainstream media company.
According to David’s latest post:
- Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger's and reader's minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the "big head" of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
- Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media
- Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
- There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
- Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low - in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
- The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
With time blogs will continue to take position on the mainstream media however, I do not think mainstream media will go away. I think blogs and mainstream media play off one another. Mainstream media is reporting more on items that turn up in blogs while the fact that bloggers can now fire back at mainstream media reports should only make the mainstream media reports better as they focus more attention t0 reporting accurate news and accounts.
*David Sifry image thanks to Mutually Inclusive
