Technorati 100 Here Today Gone Tomorrow

Based on the recent dis­cus­sion about new gate­keep­ers, I recently won­dered whether we were just delud­ing our­selves in think­ing that there were gate­keep­ers. What pro­voked this line of think­ing was a recent com­ment by Doc Searls in which he says that “being an alpha blog­ger was like being an alpha para­me­cium.” This pushed me to ana­lyze the rank of move within the Tech­no­rati 100. As fre­quent read­ers of this blog know, I did a study back in May 2005, in which I ana­lyzed link­age to mem­bers of the Tech­no­rati 100. Using this data as a point in time, I have now decided to revisit the list and see how much move­ment happened.

The first thing to do was to map out which of the May 19, 2005 mem­bers were still on the list. The results looked like this:

This pro­vided me with a depar­ture point but it wasn’t really get­ting at what I wanted. Obvi­ously, a fair num­ber of peo­ple had changed posi­tion. So I decided to take a cut of the same data on the 20th of Feb­ru­ary and start map­ping out move­ment. It looked as follows:

This pro­vided me with two points in time: One in May 2005 and one in Feb­ru­ary 2006, 9 months later. If the the­ory of gate­keep­ers held true, the lists should have been pretty consistent.

What the data showed, how­ever, was that the tech­no­rati 100 list is a very dynamic one. Let’s take a look at some of the moves.

Boing Boing: King of the blogosphere

Only one blog, Boing Boing, man­age to hold its posi­tion steady in the last 9 months. Sit­ting at the top spot, it looks like it won’t move for a long time to come.

The movers and shakers

In this new list, 9 blogs suc­cess­fully moved up in the last 9 months. They are:

• EnGad­get (from 6 to 2)
• Post Secret (67 to 4)
• Thought Mechan­ics (89 to 7)
• Google offi­cial blog (57 to
• Michelle Malkin (27 to 10)
• A list apart (24 to 17)
• Gawker (29 to 19)
• Defamer (94 to 53)
• Gothamist (88 to 85)

Those were all blogs that appeared on both lists and man­aged to climb up in the ranks. More sur­pris­ing, how­ever, was the fact that 65 new blog­gers appeared on the list, new claimant to the title of top blog­ger. A quick analy­sis seems to point to Asian blogs becom­ing a major force, one that I per­son­ally have not heard much about in dis­cus­sion of the evo­lu­tion of the blo­gos­phere. David Sifry’s State of the Blo­gos­phere did not cover any of this type of move­ment when he did his last overview of the state of the blo­gos­phere. I don’t know if he delib­er­ately decided to ignore the data or whether he did not see it as that impor­tant but I con­sider this a pretty pow­er­ful obser­va­tion. In a world where glob­al­i­sa­tion is key, the blo­gos­phere has not yet fully grap­pled with the impact of the Asian Pacific region and there prob­a­bly will be some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion around this in the future.

From a legacy stand­point, it also seems that upward moves are not fully dis­trib­uted across the space. The fol­low­ing table shows how the legacy upward moves were dis­trib­uted among the population:

So being in the top 50 per­centile makes it eas­ier to move up, which would give some cre­dence to a net­work effect. How­ever, because we are talk­ing about such a small seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion, it is impos­si­ble to gen­er­ate any mean­ing­ful con­clu­sion from the data.

The endan­gered list

While 65 blogs already dropped off the list, the 25 fol­low­ing blogs are in dan­ger for the next 9 months as they have suf­fered a drop in rank­ing over the last 9 months:

• Daily Kos (from 3 to 5)
• Giz­modo (4 to 9)
• Instapun­dit (2 to 12)
• Dooce (9 to 15)
• Kot­tke (14 to 21)
• Fark (5 to 23)
• Won­kette (19 to 25)
• Talk­ing Points Memo (12 to 26)
• Pow­er­line (21 to 33)
• Sco­belizer (32 to 34)
• LGF (13 to 35)
• Escha­ton (8 to 36)
• Joel On Soft­ware (36 to 39)
• Some­thing Awful (25 to 44)
• Metafil­ter (16 to 47)
• Andrew Sul­li­van (10 to 51)
• Best Page in the Uni­verse (11 to 52)
• Hugh Hewitt (41 to 55)
• Web Stan­dard Project (35 to 57)
• Buzz Machine (45 to 60)
• Captain’s Quar­ter (63 to 70)
• The Volokh con­spir­acy (31 to 74)
• Doc Searls (17 to 92)
• Informed Com­ment (47 to 93)
• Script­ing News (20 to 95)

The inter­est­ing thing, in terms of that drop is that it seems to affect mem­bers across the list as a whole in a sim­i­lar fash­ion. A quick analy­sis of the drop break­down shows no clear advan­tage in being near the top of the list ver­sus being closer to the bottom:

More inter­est­ing is that this num­ber is low com­pared to the blogs which dis­ap­peared com­pletely from the top 100. That num­ber stands at 65 and breaks down as follows:

A dynamic list

If you take those num­bers, it means that a total of 90 blogs (25 drop­ping within the list and another 65 drop­ping off the list com­pletely) ended up with a lower posi­tion in 9 months. Com­bined with the fact that 9 blogs moved up, this means that 99 per­cent of the list was dynamic.

This, to me, was a pretty stun­ning rev­e­la­tion: while there is much obses­sion about who is and isn’t on those lists, it seems that their nature is a lot more dynamic than expected. Going beyond that, it also look like being on top is no guar­an­tee that you will stay there (if any­thing, it is a guar­an­tee that you will not, as 9 out of 10 blogs fell and 65 per­cent dis­ap­peared from the list altogether).

Because the over­whelm­ing major­ity of the blogs listed in May 2005 expe­ri­enced a down­ward spin, it seems that the con­cept of a net­work effect is widely over­stated. In fact, there seems to be the equiv­a­lent of a reverse pull, where being a Tech­no­rati 100 is only a short lived glory.

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