Blogging statistics bane of a web loggers existence

Earlier in the week, when reading Debra Galant’s blog, she published an article on how “blogs and blogging are also a game. And it’s very easy, at any given time, to see if you’re winning. Or losing. How are your Technorati numbers? How many hits? Who are your referrers? I have quoted Mark Federman on this before: “Blogstats are the crack cocaine of the Internet.”
Turns out the Debra is not the only one kvetching about blogging traffic and links (as for me, I check my Sitemeter stats only, oh say, 15 or 20 times a day). The New York Times’ Catherine Greenman, in an article published in the Times’ Circuits section, ruminates on how “the question of how to attract readers inevitably enters a blogger’s mind.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times’ David Gallagher, writes about “the information glut” that weblogs have begun to cause.

“By pointing readers to the Web’s newest and best bits, Web logs offer a way to cut through online clutter. But now that there are millions of blogs, what was once a solution to the information glut has started to become part of the problem.”

Gallagher points readers to websites, like Kinja.com, which automatically compile digests of blogs covering a range of subject areas. Both Bloglines and Feedster, although somewhat more complex for the average reader to use, perform much the same function as Kinja.
Perhaps, though — links and traffic, Technorati, Sitemeter, Kinja, Blogdex and Feedster aside — the hope that exists for web logs in the journalistic universe of the new millennium lies, at least to some extent, in the assertions made in Jonathan’s Dube’s article, Blogs still rare, but foster community, on CyberJournalist.net. When all is said and done, each and every web log journalist must take a few minutes to reflect on the enterprise in which each one of us have engaged.
Web logs are very much part of the new digital democracy. In the corporate world of journalism, as reader (and broadcast journalist) Michael Eckford recently wrote in an e-mail to VanRamblings, “the media business is starting to be frighteningly homogenized. The voices offering different perspectives and opinions are finally starting to be heard and, as usual, in a forum that the media still doesn’t recognise as being viable. That shortsightedness may be the saving grace!”
“Basically I’m saying ‘keep it up’. People like you make it much easier for people like me to get a fair, balanced, and interesting view of the world both locally and internationally.”
May we all keep up the good work. There is so much more good to come.

Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

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