Posted on 08/16/2005 1:26:10 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Blog readership has risen dramatically this year as the number and reputation of blogs spread, with unique visitors to the top 50 blog-related sites up 31 percent in the first seven months of the year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
By July 2005, blogs boasted 29.3 million unique visitors, amounting to 20 percent of active U.S. Internet users, the survey said Monday.
Blog hosting sites, which have spawned millions of blogs, play a key role in the spike in current blog readership. Blog host sites require very little technological knowledge from bloggers and their readers.
MSN Spaces, which came out in beta last December, has grown 947 percent since January, with an audience of 3.3 million in June. It officially launched in April. The MSN Spaces site ranked No. 5 in visitors in July, with 3.3 million.
But No. 1 is Google’s blogger, with 12.6 million visitors. That was nearly double No. 2 Xanga’s 6.9 million.
Filling out the top five were two Six Apart products, Live Journal at No. 3 and TypePad at No. 4, with 5.4 million and 4.6 million, respectively.
The lower half of the top 10 was filled by individual and group blogs, rather than blog hosts. They were The Drudge Report, The Smoking Gun, Free Republic, The Huffington Post, and Fark.
Ranking controversy
As blogs become more popular, the process of ranking them becomes more controversial, especially for some of their authors. Last week’s blog readership numbers from comScore Networks showed a different story, with blogs at different spots in the rankings. comScore’s numbers stemmed from an earlier and longer time period (see Blog Readers Up 45% in Q1).
ComScore’s numbers were hotly contested, especially by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, whose popular Engadget landed at No. 24. In the Nielsen/NetRating data, Engadget is No. 11, with 787,000 visitors in July.
The blogging community has struggled in recent months with the idea of top blogs and how they should be determined. The Technorati 100, which also measures blogs by links, has been heavily criticized.
On Tuesday, blog search company Feedster debuted its Top 500 blog list, which bases its ranking on number of inbound links and freshness of content. The first month’s ranking has Engadget in first place, followed by deviantArt, Boing Boing, Albino Blacksheep, and Daily Kos.
Mr. Calacanis, one of Technorati’s most vocal critics, was quick to write on his blog, “The Feedster 500 is out… and it’s amazing!”
RSS Mess
While blog visitors are sometimes perceived to be a tech-savvy bunch, Nielsen/NetRatings said 66 percent of that group do not know what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is. RSS, a tool for consolidating new information from web sites, has been the subject of much development and discussion.
Yet just 11.3 percent say they use RSS feeds, which can vastly simplify the process of visiting multiple sites. Half of those surveyed by Nielsen/NetRatings had never heard of RSS and 15.7 percent said they had heard of RSS but didn’t know what it does.
Some have suggested that RSS is too opaque a term. Microsoft, while assuring techies that it understands the value of RSS (see Behind Microsoft’s RSS Move), has used a more generic word to describe its syndication technology: “web feeds” (see: Redmond Ignites an RSS Fury).
Bloglines, NewsGator, and Google News also use the term “feeds,” giving non-techies a clearer idea of what they’re getting.
Sorry, CG beat ya.
I did it to please BigB.
It's a lager beer, it's an ale beer.
Thanks!
It two beers in one.
Google has a blog? who knew? How do I get there to check it out? ( I lead such a sheltered weblife..)
google it! =)
Interesting story here; never heard of Red Herring so I took a look at it.
Blessings on you.
google WHAT?....( come on..give me a break..I'm a Luddite..I finally figured out how to program my VCR, and they invented the darn DVD player..
Pajamahadeen Rule... rise of the New Media
various FR links | 09-17-04 | The Heavy Equipment Guy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1219250/posts
Hey, cool. Jim Robinson in stereo.
Damn......
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