UPDATED
Nielsen BuzzMetrics discusses its purported “Top 100 Blog Posts of 2006” with a brief introduction, but makes the actual list only available in PDF format. Lame.
UPDATE: The list is now online in a non-lame HTML format
The measure used by the company is the number of links to the individual post by individual blogs, which is arguably a good metric.
But the survey puts the (terrific) Crooks and Liars site into the top 100 almost two dozen times, which shows the difficulty of this measurement. Why? Because as far as I can tell, all of the links are to posts where C&L was simply republishing videos from other sources. For the most part, pointers to those postings are, in fact, pointers to the videos, not the C&L commentary.
Lists like this may not be all that illuminating, but they definitely are good PR for companies that put them out, which I suppose is their main purpose.
on Jan 5th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Hi Dan,
Max Kalehoff here, and I work at Nielsen BuzzMetrics with Jonathan Carson. Many thanks for commenting on our team’s analyisis of top blog posts, ranked by inbound links. We agree with you: it’s lame that all we had was a PDF (on Jonathan’s blog). For the record, the full chart kept making Moveable Type crash, when trying to embed the chart in the actual post, so the PDF was the best we could do at that moment. (Trust me, I don’t like PDF’s, either.) Since then, we simply created a standard Web page and linked to it here.
If you have recommendations for making this list and other analyses more illuminating — questions you think we should try to be answering — our team would love your input. We’re working on a new schedule and frameworks for these and other public, macro views of the data for 2007. Of course, we also try to open up a lot of the technology to the public on blogpulse.com. We are a commercial enterprise, but we’re all also very passionate about our work and appreciate feedback from the broader community.
Thanks,
Max Kalehoff
on Jan 5th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
I think that the links to “Crooks And Liars” are meaningful, even if it’s for hosting rather than commentary. They show which items are popular. It might be useful to refine the categorization into “hosting” among other categories. There’s some value in knowing which videos are hot, but that’s not the same as what punditry is most echoed.
The whole list is amusing in a way – gadgets, videos, and demagoguery. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss …