Trends/Numbers

Every time I open my Google newsreader, I am slightly annoyed by the incestuous nature of the blogosphere. Techcrunch writes something good, and 30 other blogs write posts about it, without offering much value add. The reason it’s annoying is because if I am subscribed to those 30 blogs, I am sure as hell subscribed to Techcrunch.

But that is highly hypocritical of me, since I do the same thing all the time (case in point is this very post). In theory, I try to add my own spin, or I write for those people who I genuinely think might have missed the content I am re-posting. In the past, I have even tried to aggregate top content from many sites to make it easier for others to keep up, (and I think I shall go back to doing that). And more than that, I love it when others link to *my* blog.

But guess who is not complaining? The Techcrunch’s of this world. Because of the way authority is measured in the blogosphere, the more people who link to your posts, the more popular your blog will be deemed to be by search engines and the like. The more popular the search engines think you are, the more popular they make you by offering your content at the top of search results. I guess it’s just the way that the cookie crumbles.

Technorati is the best known tool for measuring blog authority, and they have now started a monthly feature where they list the sites (not just blogs) with the most link-backs from blogs, in the past 30 days. Not really surprisingly, 61% of links on blogs are to other blogs. But what are bloggers linking to when they are not linking to each other? This is a list of the top 50 non-blog content sites:

• YouTube
• New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN
• guardian.co.uk
• Washington Post
• Yahoo! News
• Reuters
• Los Angeles Times
• Telegraph.co.uk
• MSNBC
• The Wall Street Journal
• Time
• Wired
• USA Today
• boston.com
• FOX News
• Daily Mail
• ESPN
• CBS News
• Financial Times
• Forbes
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Chicago Tribune
• The White House
• New York Post
• New York Daily News
• International Herald Tribune
• PBS
• Salon.com
• BusinessWeek
• Slate
• Newsweek
• New York Magazine
• Economist.com
• CBC.ca
• San Francisco Examiner
• MarketWatch
• Chicago Sun-Times
• US News & World Report
• Houston Chronicle
• Yahoo! Sports
• Entertainment Weekly
• Seattle Times
• E! Online
• People
• Science Daily
• Style.com
• The Christian Science Monitor

I am not sure how this was measured, since a lot of these sites have blogs, or at the very least regular columnists. But there you go. Yes, Youtube is more popular the New York Times, but overall, I am impressed by the high quality of sites that made it into the Top 50.  I wonder if the list will change much in the coming months? I suspect not.