WARNING: SEVERE LANGUAGE AHEAD. If you don’t like this sort of language, well… you know what 🙂
Catallaxy, a blog I’ve never heard of before, but apparently ranks in the 30000’s at Technorati (yes folks, spam blogs rate higher there), partakes in some good ol’ fashioned tall poppy bashing, following on from Meg’s great Australian Top 100 blogs list, this time saying that Tim Blair should be Australia’s top blogger over the other chap who is, on the basis that Blair has 4000 more page views a day. That, and that they should be higher up the list as well.
Is it just me, or is something a little small, perhaps in their pants?
Give me a break. Not taking away from Tim Blair here, he has a strong following in the political blogosphere, particularly in Australia, but page views mean diddly squat in the age of RSS feeds and influence. The other blog has in excess of 22,000 subscribed readers alone, and I know that as a subscriber (still, personal issues aside it’s still occasionally a good read…god that hurts 🙂 ) I very rarely ever visit the site, if at all, and yet I READ IT EVERY DAY. It’s the conundrum of providing a full feed, your readers may never visit the site so your page stats NEVER reflect your influence or readership…indeed no where close.
But I think, being Friday, that we should start a new list, the
OMG I have a small penis, pack of jealous, petty Australian c*nts list.
1. Catallaxy.
I’m sure the folks who write this unknown blog, who probably just got the biggest link here they’ve ever got, will sleep better tonight knowing that they’ve topped a list. The rest of us, who are too busy getting on with things, who care more about our readers instead of lists, will continue to do what we always do, write for an international audience who use Alexa and like to link to us 🙂
Catallaxy is a group blog. One of our staffwriters wrote that observation based on information provided by Tim Blair. Yes, it was probably a tad on the snippy side, but there are eight of us, not one, all with different takes on the world.
I write for Club Troppo as well, one of the blogs I note that you’ve visited. Similarly, Jacques – who is also only one of a number of writers – is the only other libertarian (besides me) at Club Troppo.
For my part, I suspect what we’re seeing in the blog world is the same division that happened to newspapers and novels a century ago – a division into ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’, a division into audiences based on markerting and an audience based on chewing the political fat.
FWIW I still suspect that Tim Blair would be Australia’s most popular blogger, in part because he doesn’t divide his energies among several blogs and has a huge US readership. That doesn’t mean I somehow think less of those who – to use Jacques’ phrase – are into more full-on capitalism, like the gentleman from ProBlogger. Both he and Tim make a very nice living from blogging. We at Troppo and Catallaxy, by contrast, make pocket money and pay our hosting fees 🙂
What it does highlight is the need to come up with a metric that does measure popularity accurately. Sitemeter and Technorati are helpful in this respect, Alexa less so because many people refuse to install it (it behaves like spyware on Unix and Mac machines, and is banned in many workplaces). So save the snippyness (it looks like we’re square on that score by now); elitism exists all over the place. We at Catallaxy (and Troppo) showed how it can emerge even in the blogging world, and if it’s any consolation it’s not something I care about. Nor, for that matter, does Jason Soon, Catallaxy’s editor. He truly does not care – as long as people show up in the comments and say something interesting, he’s as happy as a clam.
Dude get a grip.
Firstly,Rafe wrote that post and there are 8 of us.
Secondly, he didn’t mean anything by that. It’s not as if he was complaining we were being under-represented, he was talking about *some other blog* being underrepresented.
Thirdly, this is the biggest link we’ve ever got?? I’ve never heard of you in my life, fella and I paid like 30 seconds attention to the post that Rafe wrote. I only came back here because Skepticlawyer (who wrote the comment above) drew it to my attention. I know and care bugger all about the difference between page views and hits and what have you. I don’t even have access to my site statistics which is held by my host and I’ve never asked him for it in years.
Get a grip, IT geek and stop insulting everyone in such obscene terms over something which wasn’t even a slight.
Ah, you’ve just found Jason’s legendary short temper 🙂
In all seriousness, this was inevitable. Perform any ranking and people will question it. Some (like yours truly) will unkind, even elitist remarks about others (such as Problogger et al). I do hope we can all settle down after a while. I really love the work put out at Catallaxy and I was thrilled when Ken asked me to hop on board at Club Troppo. I hope there’s more like it out there!
Duncan, I don’t know what a West Australian New Media Developer is when he’s at home but I guess we’d call you a whiny little nerdy bitch. What the hell is wrong with you? You diss Catallaxy when you knew anything outside of your circle of tossers, you’d know Catallaxy is a serious blog run by serious people and it has serious readers. They are academics, professionals and Famous People not B-grade Internet Identities whose only claim to fame is they worked out where to put their adsense ads to boost their CTR!
And, BTW, Catallaxy Files has the same google page rank as your site so get off your high horse.
Oh and what’s up with this fixation on blogger’s penises, dude?
I liked you better when you were just the Goatse guy.
Hayekian Flamethrower !!!!! If the name doesn’t give you up as an uneducated, piss ant wanker, then your comments certainly do. One rating system doesn’t agree with you and all of a sudden that system and all associated with it cop a dose of your vile crap.
“They are academics, professionals and “F”amous “P”eople you say. What a shame you aren’t.
Still I suppose insignificant little trollop rooters (gee I only read your post once and already I’m writing like an academic) like you can only receive attention by diplaying the best virtues of the ones we like to call the “incurable fuckwits” of society.
Late to the thread due to WP not letting me know about comments: got to fix that.
Whiny little nerdy bitch. IT Geek. ROFL. I’m a wannabe geek, but I’ve never managed to get there, she who must be obeyed restricts my gadget purchases to the point where I’ve only just bought a flat screen TV to replace the 8 year old model we have, oh, and BTW, IT geeks usually don’t excel at things like athletics…don’t make me revisit my past, I’m sure I can pull the trophies out of the garage 🙂
True, I don’t know the blog, and if it’s a group blog and the opinions expressed are not those of all of its writers, but only one, then you all have my humblest apologies, with no reservations. I wasn’t aware it was a group blog.
My PR ranking is the same! ROFL. hehehe, PR as a measure of reach, lol.
But seriously, I’m whiny when you look at this post at Catallaxy?
You know what, when I cared about status and rank in my Blog Herald days, you know what I used lists for? targets. Targets of where I wanted to be and what I wanted to achieve. If I wasn’t top of a list, or Top 100 I’d aim to be so, indeed when I started the site in 2003 my first goal (and longest running) was to be Top 100 @ Technorati, the day I sold it the blog came in at 100 on one of Technorati’s lists. And you know what, if I started a serious blog tomorrow I’d set similar goals, Top 10 on the Australian list, Top 1000 Technorati, then Top 500, then eventually Top 100. Lists are only good for goal setting, and discovering other blogs, they shouldn’t be used in some sort of petty point scoring game against other blogs you don’t like: best way to beat the people you don’t like is to try harder and climb the greasy pole, and when you’re at the top, then you can say you’ve achieved something, and maybe even have the right to knock others.
Duncan;
I went back over Rafe’s post, he didn’t whine at all.
He:
* listed a series of well-known political blogs and their rankings,
* remarked that he was surprised that Troppo and John Quiggin weren’t on the list (Quiggin still isn’t), and
* relayed that Tim Blair had pointed out he had more readers, going by the stats.
There wasn’t much whining. That was taken up by yours truly on Club Troppo.
Still, the list did serve a good purpose in bringing a whole bunch of good stuff to everyone’s attention. It also prompted me to look into Technorati rankings and such, which turned out to be defective for Club Troppo at least – some sort of glitch meant we weren’t updated for 18 months or so. I think it should be OK soon.
As for goals, a lot of the “ozplogs” aren’t really aiming to be this or that on a list. There’s the usual amount of vanity of course; everyone likes to be popular. But I think that people prefer respect as much as numbers, which is why the group blogs have tended to dominate the mindset of the political blogging scene: Catallaxy, Club Troppo and Larvatus Prodeo being leading libertarian, centrist and leftist group blogs.
Well sorry to hear about your penis being small but you can always try using a penis pump and seeing if that helps out any on getting more size for your penis.
Well sorry to hear about your penis being small but you can always try using a penis pump and seeing if that helps out any on getting more size for your penis.