Just as Doc Searls talks about the generosity of the web on Nathan Torkington’s site, and Kate follows up praising the contributions made by generous individuals in the Web 2.0 model, we have Aaron Brazell who says the blogosphere should remain elite.
What is the cause for his ire?
Technorati reportedly started indexing MySpace blogs last week.
“It’s a good thing to be in the elite and it’s highly unfair to those of us who work hard to position our blogs in strategically excellent positioning to have the pool of content thinned by less than excellent content,” wrote Brazell.
Okay, so let’s talk elitism.
Today, Technorati shows it is tracking 33.2 million blogs. If you take the information from the last State of the Blogosphere and extrapolate the percentages, there are an estimated 16.6 million blogs that are still posting three months after they started (this number runs about 50 percent of the total number of blogs). Dave Sifry, if you have more recent numbers, we would love to hear from you.
Of those 16.6 million, an estimated 3 million post at least once a week.
This means that only an estimated nine percent of bloggers post regularly, once a week or more. I would love to see how many post three times a week or more, it would probably be a lot less. I would say 9 percent of all bloggers is a pretty elite number, but how will this group be impacted by MySpace?
It’s all about quality.
Critics say indexing MySpace will degrade the quality of results. I say that quality and the blogging platform are not mutually exclusive. There are as many low-quality blogs outside of MySpace as inside.
Moreover, MySpace bloggers have been leveraging the tool pretty well. Such as in the walk out of students last week in protest of the illegal immigration bill passed by the House of Representatives.
My point is that by adding MySpace to Technorati, we aren’t going to dramatically change the arithmetic. There are very few people that are motivated enough to post regularly, and there is no need to leave people out just because we all want higher stats.
Plus, I could use a really convenient way to track conversations on MySpace for my clients.
What do you think?
