Scott Beale/Laughing Squid
Nick Douglas |
Huffington Post |
Posted Wednesday January 3, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Forget the top newspapers -- what are the most-read blogs on the Internet? While traffic is hard to measure directly, Technorati lists the top 100 blogs by number of inbound links. How has the top tier changed since this time last year?
- As Bloggers Blog notes, tech blogs (Lifehacker, Ars Technica, TechCrunch) have edged out conservative blogs (Instapundit, Michelle Malkin) on the top 10. AOL's Engadget replaced hodgepodge blog Boing Boing as Blog #1.
- All the blogs in last year's top 10 are still in the top 40. Apparently Clive Thompson was right about the power law: it's hard to knock a blog from the top.
- Dropping from 9 to 14 was Crooks and Liars, which earned its high spot by posting every must-see clip from the Daily Show and other media. Why the fall? Everything is on YouTube now, rendering C&L redundant.
- Liberal blogs Daily Kos and the Huffington Post stayed in the top 10, as did PostSecret, the confessional postcard clearinghouse.
- This year's hard charger, TechCrunch, shot up from #70 to #4 as its owner Michael Arrington built its readership, authority, and plenty of media coverage as Silicon Valley's default business blog.
- The mightiest to fall (from #9 to #37) is Dooce, first known in 2002 as the anonymous blogger who got canned for her blog (thereafter known as getting "dooced"). It's impressive that any one person -- no news cycle, no writing team -- could maintain a top 40 spot for so long after a lesser writer would have squandered their fame. Dooce did it while raising a child and despite putting up ads. But it looks like topical and group blogs have more linkbaiting power.
- The top newbie on the top 50: Yanxi.bokewu.com, a popular Chinese forum. Top new English-language blog: TMZ.com, the AOL/Warner Brothers-owned gossip blog. It's broken (or at least covered early and often) several stories, including Mel Gibson's struggle against the Jewish oligarchy and Michael Richards' classy response to hecklers.(And it's one of our Media Winners of 2006 for the same reason.)
NB: Technorati ranks blogs by the number of blogs linking to them in the past six months. Title borrowed from This Is What We Do Now, a sharp and underrated blog. Pictured: 3/5 of the Boing Boing team.
