This isn’t something I’m particularly fond of writing, but it’s just so wrong it cant be left unsaid.
The Age covers the Top 100 Australian blogs, and finishes with this:
One blogger, who did not want to be named, told The Age that the top blog, Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger site, was outperformed by a lot of other top Australian blogs in terms of visitor numbers. He said Ms Tsiamis’ methodology would skew the results towards “extremely geeky” blogs, or blogs with an unusually strong overseas readership.
Bloggers who say things like this anonymously are gutless little shits who shouldn’t be blogging to start with, are needlessly jealous and probably are suffering from relevance and page view depravation syndrome as well…that and it’s complete bullocks. I’ve seen the raw figures for that blog in the past, and whilst I can’t report on what it is today, that blog pumps through some seriously big numbers. Is it possible that other Australian blogs have audiences close to it? yes, outperformed? not impossible, but unlikely in all but a handful of sites, and even then not by a far margin (if at all). The proof as always is in the numbers, not only the ones used in this Top 100 list, but also the raw data, of which this gutless little wonder doesn’t have access.
The problem of course with any list is that people miss out, it pitches people against people where competition isn’t either necessary, healthy or required.
BTW the quote: “extremely geeky blogs, or blogs with an unusually strong overseas readership”? WTF? if anything geeky tech blogs are GROSSLEY under-represented on that list, a similar list for most other countries would be dominated by tech, this list isn’t. And “an unusually strong overseas readership” PLEASE EXPLAIN?!?! Xenophobia perhaps, what, overseas people reading Australian blogs is as welcome as the Black Panthers at a One Nation meeting? Petty, stupid stuff. By all means, take this particular blog down a peg, but do it based on facts and reasonable argument, not pure stupidity.
Hey Mate,
Just read the crux of the article together with the final para, one hunbly suggests that the author, led the article with a very bad angle initially, and then finished in roughly the same way. To a relative novice, like me, it cames across, as a lost opportunity to get more eyeballs online.
And as for the other supposed blogger quoted, …best fogotten…
Oh well, there will be other times, I am sure.
Well said Duncan (and thanks for saying it).
Tall Poppy Syndrome strikes again. How the heck can anyone *know* definitively? Gutless, like you say.
Totally agree with your rant, Duncan.
It was such a great list that both Meg and Craig produced and as Darren said before, “what excites me about them [Top 100 Australian blogs] is that surfing the list helped me find some great new blogs that I wasn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t previously aware of.”
Why can’t we just enjoy this list without throwing knives around the joint?
Well said. Pathetic. And pathetic of the journo to run such a comment. Especially in Melbourne – you’d like to thing they’d be proud of their boy doing so well, not just on the Oz list, but globally. Darren really should live in Brissie and it would be front page in the Courier Mail – “Queenslander Top International Blogger!”. And I agree with others, the best thing about all this is that some of us are finding and talking with others of us.
As mentioned elsewhere, I also can’t imagine a bigger blog than Problogger in Australia, and definitely not many!!! How silly!
I have a feeling where the bits about tech and overseas readership comes from. Maybe because Technorati and Alexa were used for the list? (not that I know anything about it, it’s just what I have heard. Especially about Alexa, there’s a plugin for Firefox users (for example, my non-tech blog has about 70% IE users). Again about my blog: it’s not on Technorati at all, I’m having trouble claiming it, so my ranking there is 0. But my Alexa ranking is quite good, so I’d probably make the list if I had a technorati ranking(says Meg).
Just to be clear though, that wasn’t my quote, and I can’t imagine there being biggers sites than Darren’s. And mine might be up there, but I certainly wouldn’t be at the top! (I’m getting more and more curious to where I would be though, even though it doesn’t mean much! Damn Technorati and there non-existent support!!)
Also, Karen Cheng is right up there(15), and that isn’t a tech blog, though does have quite a large readership overseas, I believe.
And didn’t Meg use the Australian Alexa rank especially so that it was a bit more geared towards what people are reading in Australia anyway?
Perhaps the fine folk at Hitwise could assist with providing a ‘real’ look at the situation.
I agree with you. Of course, no methodology is perfect nor is it going to make everyone happy. Some of the inclusions on the list like the two abc program sites are not actually blogs. And I was surprised to see Frank Arrigo so low on the list. In any event there were no fairfax blogs on the site and maybe the mystery blogger quoted was a pissed off colleague of the journalist! Hey, I’m an old cynic.
Trevor
You make a very valid point – just because you stick an RSS feed on something doesn’t make it a “blog”.
Your point about Frank Arrigo may well be valid, being part of the msdn may disadvantage him to some extent – if I factored in an Alexa Rank of 12 it just wouldn’t be fair (for obvious reasons), so an average is applied.
I was thinking just how many food blogs there were. I guess it’s all in what you’re looking for.
Why say ‘bullocks’, should it not be ‘bollocks’?