Ten Thousand Hits

5:22 PM Thursday, April 6, 2006

[The tale of the Long Tail and the Magic Middle]

It was only last November 11 that I posted a celebration of the five thousandth visit to Jonathan's Coffeeblog. Some time today the total number of "hits" will have doubled. Of course I am ecstatic about this, but what does it mean? Is Jonathan's Coffeeblog a successful weblog? Is it popular? How does it stack up against other weblogs? Is the ten thousandth hit an important milestone? Or, as Keisuke said about many other things, is it of no importance? What is the meaning of a successful weblog? What is the meaning of life?

For an answer, I turn to Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, long considered the primo search engine for blogs. According to the Wikipedia, Technorati indexes 32.9 million weblogs, of which Jonathan's Coffeeblog is only one. Based on the number of other weblogs which link to Jonathan's Coffeeblog, it is ranked number 313,376 as of the date of this post. They still rank Boing Boing as Number One with an alleged 66,219 links from 20,223 sites. But how about Technorati itself? Technorati has a weblog which, it says, has 1000 posts linked to it (this blog has a pathetic 38 from 9 sites), but does not publish a rank. Dave Sifry's own weblog is ranked number 469 (2,607 links from 1,243 sites) If you want to find out how Technorati ranks Jonathan's Coffeeblog on the day you click, this is the place to click. Read it and weep. The good news, however, is that there may be a Magic Middle, according to Dave, in which the blogs are "interesting, exciting, informative, and witty" and "in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing." The Magic Middle, in turn, is part of the Long Tail (the millions of low-ranked weblogs), which controversially may have some cultural influence or market clout although they are not among the Boing Boings and their ilk.

Now for you number crunchers and bean counters out there: I subscribe to a weblog statistical service which is constantly upgrading its capacity to feed me useful information. Half of my site visits come from search engines at Google, Google Images and Yahoo. Eastgate (the Tinderbox folks), Mark Bernstein (Eastgate chief scientist), Flickr, Laughing Squid, and Technorati account for 8.6% of the hits, and the rest come mainly from overseas search engines. Image searches account for a surprising (to me) 16.9% of hits from Google alone. I get very few comments (bad news) and no comment spam (good news). Hits from outside of the USA account for 37% of the total, and computers which visit Jonathan's Coffeeblog are running in 22 languages other than English, of which Spanish, German, and Italian, account for almost 8% of total hits. But do they read it? Well, Google users in the aggregate have logged 8 hours, 25 minutes, and 49 seconds for the last 4000 visits to this weblog, and that figure is low, because if anybody leaves without clicking on a link, their visit length can't be calculated. However, there is no guarantee that the Googlers didn't go out to lunch or visit the bathroom while their computers were faithfully racking up time on Jonathan's Coffeeblog. (The duration record for today was 20 minutes and 25 seconds, from a Windows user in Raleigh, North Carolina. That's not much time for lunch, even for an American). So, dear readers, keep on visiting, because Boing Boing to the contrary notwithstanding, Jonathan's Coffeeblog ranks #1 in authority and popularity with ME. And if you really, really, REALLY like Jonathan's Coffeeblog you can designate it a favorite on Technorati by clicking here.

More links on related topics: Blogging LongTail Technorati DaveSifry Tinderbox

Images and art about: Bloggers Technorati

| Technorati Tags: Favorites Popular Technorati Magic Middle