Month: July 2007

Nielsen is changing it’s webranking system from counting page views to length of visit:

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Interesting and probably more accurate, at least for already heavily visited sites. If you only have ten views but each of those are for an average of ten minutes, that doesn’t really make you better than the guy with 5000 views for around five minutes each.

It’s interesting to see as the two measurements would benefit sites differently. Number of visits are greater for sites that tend to update more often while length of visits would benifit sites with longer content that tend to not update as frequently. (UPDATE: Valleywag’s thoughts off a Computerworld article.)

But let’s take this handy measurement and see how Virginia blogs measure up. Taking the top ten posted by NLS back in April:

1. Not Larry Sabato—- 2,447 Visitors Per Day
2. Raising Kaine———-1,883 Visitors Per Day
3. BVBL————————-635 Visitors Per Day
4. Bearing Drift————–432 Visitors Per Day
5. Virginia Progressive—-330 Visitors Per Day
6. Bacon’s Rebellion———328 Visitors Per Day
7. 750 Volts——————–93 Visitors Per Day
8. The Ward View————85 Visitors Per Day
9. SLANTBlog——————67 Visitors Per Day
10. BYP—————————-42 Visitors Per Day

Length of visits (as of today):

1. BVBL ———————— 4:50 min/visit
2. Raising Kaine ————— 4:12 min/visit
3. Not Larry Sabato ———— 4:07 min/visit
4. The Ward View ————— 3:31 min/visit
5. Bacon’s Rebellion ———– 3:07 min/visit
6. Bearing Drift ————— 2:59 min/visit
7. Virginia Progressive ——– 1:16 min/visit
8. 750 Volts ——————- 1:15 min/visit
9. J’s Notes ——————- 0:41 min/visit
10. BYP ———————— 0:39 min/visit

I can’t find SLANTBlog’s SiteMeter link. You lose, Terry, so instead I listed myself. I average 61 unique visitors a day, so that should mean something!

NLS and BVBL swapped spots. The Ward View had the biggest jump of four spaces, from 8 to 4. Short of listing every single blog in the VAblogosphere, the whole thing still holds pretty even.

The Bivings Report is, er, reporting that the Sacramento Bee is requiring commenters on its website to start using their real names:

At first the paper allowed commenters to hide behind pseudonyms. However, to a few people’s surprise, this freed some commenters to earn the rather mild title from staffers of “provocateur” as they slung vitriol of all types at those who disagreed with them. Some site participants stopped participating out of annoyance and disgust.

To counter the provocateurs, the Bee will soon require all commenters to user their real name on the site. While, as ombudsman Aramando Acuna notes, this will likely lead to fewer comments, many readers support stripping anonymity away from commenters. Further, the paper hopes that this policy will lessen the need for it to monitor and approve or reject every comment before it is publicly posted.

Fewer commenters is not necessarily a bad thing. Quality over quantity.

It’ll be interesting to see how exactly the Bee goes about confirming these identites but I can’t fault them for setting up the restrictions. Blogs and commenting on blogs is little different than writing a letter to the editor, something very few (if any) papers take and publish anonymously.

Relating to my last post, Clay Shirky follows up yesterday’s essay with one that concludes as such:

As Scott Bradner put it, the Internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it. The upshot is that the internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom.

What Andrew Keen seems to be trying to argue through “The Cult Of The Amateur” is that the data is not the problem but that there is no one filtering it. There are no editors or publishers to ensure quality or even accuracy. And it is dangerous to assume the general public can judge this themselves. If all you get is unfiltered, flawed data, at what point can you craft a solid, well rounded, well founded opinion or even begin to get the actual truth or definition of something?

Data is subjective and selective. The audience needs to have a source of solid, certifiable information that presents something as close to the truth as possible or it will never learn.

Data is not bad. It is the lack of a filter that is dangerous.

Andrew Keen discusses the dangers Web 2.0 and mob rule. While I’m only a little ways into the book, so far his talk so far on blogging and Wikipedia and what it can do at its worst is very interesting. I don’t agree with some of his statements in the introduction on matters such as declining music sales related to piracy but I’ll give the rest of the book to flesh that out.

Excerpt available here. Choice cut:

Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.

…

I’ve spent the last two years observing the Web 2.0 revolution, and I’m dismayed by what I’ve seen.

I’ve seen the infinite monkeys, of course, typing away. And I’ve seen many other strange sights as well, including a video of marching penguins selling a lie, a supposedly infinite Long Tail, and dogs chatting to each other online. But what I’ve been watching is more like Hitchcock’s The Birds than Doctor Doolittle: a horror movie about the consequences of the digital revolution.

Because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent. As I noted earlier, it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions.

I call it the great seduction. The Web 2.0 revolution has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more people—more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.

Read the NYTimes review here.

Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.

Visit Andrew Keen’s site here.