Welcome to readers of Melbourne newspaper, The Age, from today’s article on the Top 100 Australian blogs that I mentioned yesterday (the print version also was accompanied by the Top 10 blogs on the list).
A few readers have asked me whether I’m upset by the final paragraph that reads:
“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.”
I’m not disturbed by it at all. I’m not really sure why the blogger wanted anonymity – I mentioned something similar to the reporter myself – but that’s up to them.
When asked about the list and whether I think I’m ‘the most read blog in the country’ I responded by saying that I didn’t really know. While on any given day ProBlogger is read by between 5000 and 15000 unique visitors (that’s been the range over the last month according to my sitemeter stats – my AW stats are higher) and my RSS feed is subscribed to by around 22000 readers I’m never going to claim to be the most visited blog going around. In fact from day to day my other blogs do more traffic than that and I’m sure others are at that type of level too.
A ‘Top blog’ is a pretty difficult thing to define – some would say it’s about traffic, others about incoming links, some might consider it about earnings, others would talk about profile or influence, others might consider how many posts you’ve written, while others would talk about who was ‘first’ and had sustained their blog the longest.
Ultimately – there’s no definitive way to declare any give blog ‘the best’ and to do so when blogs are written on different topics to different audiences is not really fair anyway.
Do I care that I’m listed as #1 on the list?
It’s a nice feeling – it’ll be a nice article to show my parents – it’s always nice to be written about – but in the scheme of things it doesn’t really matter who is at the top of the list. The fact that a list of Australian blogs made it into the paper at all makes me smile – but looking at the numbers of referrals coming in from the online version of the article it’s not that big a deal.
update: Duncan responds to the article here.
