Steven over at Poliblog has done some cool research blog traffic statistics with Ecosystem rankings.
Someday someone will create a standard blog counter API that will allow tools like my Ecosystem to directly read a blog’s traffic stats, but until now, we’re stuck with manual efforts like Steven’s. Good work, man!
(Hat Tip to Rachel Lucas for the link)
Day: July 3, 2003
The Blog Census
No, it’s not one of my projects! But I kinda wish it was.
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education has a fascinating project: the NITLE Blog Census:
Despite all the recent interest in blogging, few hard numbers are available about the extent of the phenomenon, particularly in languages other than English. The NITLE Blog Census is an attempt to create and share a regularly updated database of all known weblogs.
The census has been active since early May, 2003.
Our crawlers search the Web for weblogs, and attempt to categorize them by language and authoring tool. Data gathered during the census is archived every two weeks, and is available for non-commercial use. Our software respects the usual robots.txt exclusion rules. If you do not wish your weblog to be included in our surveys, please contact the site maintainer and we will expunge your site from our records.
The NITLE team has clearly given thought to the methodology: they are combining algorithmic methods of link-crawling with feeds from sources like Weblogs.com and various weblog directory lists.
And even better: it’s an open effort! You can download their data set in various forms, or use an XML-RPC API to do targeted queries.
Spiffy stuff, indeed.
Out and About
Just to quash the rumors: no, I was not — you can’t prove anything. (Thanks to the Group Captain for the link, though) .
I was, however, here, and had the pleasure of meeting many fine bloggers live and in person.
But you still can’t prove anything.