Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Now more famous than Yahoo!

Any sort of mapping the blogosphere or measuring it, even on a limited subject, is bound for failure. The best approach would be to admit that it is really, really hard, and to give up on it. The worst approach is to post a Top 100 blogs for MMO gamers, based on a totally arbitrary method (based on bloglines feeds related to Broken Toys), and then proclaiming it to be 97% accurate (thought that might have been meant ironically).

You will find me at place 68, ahead of Yahoo! (76), the New York Times (80), or Raph Koster's blog (93). Yeah, sure. I'm sitting here by the phone, waiting for a billion dollar offer from Rupert Murdoch for my blog. What an utter nonsense!

Taking a small, arbitrary community and counting the RSS feeds they subscribed to is a method that is so inherently flawed, that the results are basically useless. If you absolutely had to rank blogs, you would first need to compile a list of all MMO blogs (which would already exclude Yahoo and the NYT), and then use something like an Alexa traffic ranking (today's Traffic Rank for tobolds.blogspot.com: 231,126 ) as a score. That would tell you that for example Raph is far more famous than I am (today's Traffic Rank for raphkoster.com: 68,457 ). Not to mention Yahoo, which today happens to be on traffic rank 1 of Alexa.

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