The Technorati Popularity list – you can ignore it, love it or hate it for lots of reasons. It’s the equivalent of the All-time greatest hits chart, looking at total number of links over time. But just because Elvis or The Beatles would always be on top of the charts looking at total sales, does not mean they would be on the chart if there was a smaller timescale.
Blogpulse have a daily chart, citing the blogs with the most links on a particular day. Doing a random sample across a number of days, there’s some overlap with the Technorati list (BoingBoing, DailyKos, Engadget), but plenty of variations as well, on Sunday, blogher was at number 3.
BUt we’re still not there. The numbers increase every day, the long tail grows longer and there’s a growing call for a way of doing things differently. Whilst the instigators from Blogher are still discussing it, Jason Calacanis has gone and put his money where his mouth is. He is offering $50,000 in advertsing for a compnay who builds a listing based on what he is after, or $10,000 for an individual. He wants:
I’d add another requirement – the ability to slice and dice by category/metadata. That of course would need the categorising data to be collected form the blogs or when blogs are registered with the search services, but I can see the need to be able to assess ‘popularity’ with a niche, ie movie blogs, music blogs etc. But that’s a longer term desire.
In putting this challenge up, you could argue that Jason is acting in the ‘old model’, or, more likely the ‘male model’. There’s a problem, here’s a solution, throw money at it and get it fixed my way. This is in contrast to the more collaborative, discussion based way I see Mary Hodder’s proposal developing. So is Jason just perpetuating the male domination of the space by making more lists based on popularity? I don’t think so; he’s trying to make what we have (a subjective, measurable analysis) better and is prepared to encourage it.
