I have to say — I really like MyBlogLog. I liked it so much I wrote a review about it, and heck, I have given over real estate on this blog so that I might bask in all of its its bloglog glory (and of course, find out who is coming to visit my blog). Yesterday, the ubiquitous “Eric” of MyBlogLog, who is automatically added as your contact when you signed in, happened to pop by my Blog (Hey Eric — great job with MyBlogLog … let us know how the Yahoo acquisitions rumours go!). And it got me thinking.

How many bloggers are signed up for this thing?

Well, its easy to find out. Unless you’ve “deleted” Eric as a contact, just go to his profile on MyBlogLog (just click on his face). Check out how many contacts HE has. Assuming that many people haven’t deleted HIM as a contact, that’s probably a very, very good guestimate as to how many bloggers he’s signed on.As of this writing, its … 23,901 contacts.

(Hey, for fun, Eric should post contact “milestones” — like, who his 50 000th, 100 000th and so on.)

So that means he’s got over 23 000 bloggers signed up for the program. Now those numbers in and of them self are pretty modest (compare it to over 500 000 accounts at Digg for example), but, this number is, I think, much more important than merely another statistic.

Especially when you consider that in the technosphere, it seems like almost every single blog has these darn things (again, a hefty presumption, but that’s the kind of back-of-the-envelope math that we’re going to be exploring).
So, what does 23,901 mean? It means a few things.

1) This number is a measure of “active” bloggers; casual bloggers, or sploggers won’t necessarily be adding this widget to their blog. So don’t let that huge number of “100 000 blogs started a day ” courtesy of Mr. Sifry fool you. The actual number of bloggers creating sites for the long haul is probably much, much, much less. And therefore …

2) The number of “active” bloggers is probably much, much less than the stratospheric numbers that Technorati touts. Sure, there’s the obvious skewing because TECH blogs are more likely to post this sort of stuff up, but in orders of magnitude (Technorati says there are over 50 millions of blogs ), I think this back-of-the envelope thinking is in the right ball park. This leads to the fact that –

3) To reach a “critical mass” of bloggers doesn’t require that many bloggers. As I said, sure, its a “tech” skew, but even if it IS, the blogosphere (the North American one at least), has a disproportionately larger percentage of tech blogs anyway. If you cruise around blogs that talk about tech topics … try not to go all “ad-blind” for a second, and you’ll see how many of them actually sport the MyBlogLog widget. I don’t have any research on it — but it seems like all of the blogs I check out now sport them.

If you’re a social networker or marketer, or a startup interested in the blogosphere, you’ll pay close attention to this. (more…)

The Jason Calacanis Experiment (Not to be confused with Netscape, ‘natch) last week (Nov 24) involved a call out to his faithful readers to prove once and for all that Alexa is indeed the old-and-busted of publicly available traffic-sensing webware. He asked everyone to install the alexa tool bar, if they hadn’t done so already, and was out to prove that by gaming the Alexa system, its traffic results were flawed (the roots of this go back to a geek fight on Valleywag, as Nick Denton stated that Netscape’s numbers had dropped like a stone since Calacanis started his first experiment — but using Alexa’s traffic data).

Now its only been about six days, which is only about half the time that Jason said he would be tracking (he gave it 10 days or so), so the results might be a bit premature. But I thought it would be interesting to examine the traffic at this point, because with the buzz the Rojas-Winer-Calacanis open source iPod killer is getting, it will be hard to interpret the results in the next few days. Is the bump in traffic — if it happens — because of the experiment, or because there are other reasons to visit the blog?

Let’s look at the traffic.

,

So, when you look at the traffic graph (courtesy of Alexaholic), you can see that there was indeed a bump in traffic, although it looks modest.  This occurred over what looks like 48h, and then dropped down.  And it continues to drop as of yesterday to below its previous valley.  In relative terms it doesn’t look like much, but when you look at the Y-axis, the bump is in fact a reach of 100-150 million above where it was previously, strictly based on the Alexa traffic — one presumes.

On the other hand, the Alexa experiment was notable in and of itself — which probably drew genuine traffic (and unique visitors) towards Calacanis.com to see what the hubaloo was all about.  Therefore, it is hard to say how significant this bump in traffic really is (although perhaps not — see below).
But, let’s put this bump in traffic – even if we presume that ALL of it is due to the Alexa experiment (readers downloading the bar and/or reloading like mad) – in context.  How does this bump do relative to other traffic patterns over time?  Is it much bigger or much smaller?  Does it, for example, stand out as an exceptionally large traffic bump?

When you look at the longer term graph over, say 6 months, it really doesn’t look like it.  In fact, it almost looks like part of the normal ebb and flow of the usual traffic.  It almost looks like this bump in traffic is not “significant”, as there wasn’t a significantly huge bump in traffic for the short period of the experiment (and it looks like traffic is on the down hill slide since that time … although I expect it to perk back up because of the open source iPod thing).
But, what if we compared Alexa’s traffic patterns with another non-Alexa product?  How about a “control” … like Quantcast? (more…)

Forbes has an excellent article reporting one deliciously fast growing competitor to YouTube — a Paris production named DailyMotion.com that allows people to upload clips that have no limit (YouTube caps at 10 minutes) that has no advertising, and no obvious limitations to copyrighted material. As a result, people have been uploading full television episodes with abandon, and while it has a tiny slice of the YouTube pie (<1% compared to 65% of online video viewership), it is growing exponentially.

But its more than just online piracy writ large – the article goes into a few interesting tidbits, such as privately built online portals so people can find the exact links to where whole seasons of TV are found (five full seasons of Futurama? Fantastic!), the legality of such issues, how DailyMotion evades YouTube’s issues, and the real futility in getting DailyMotion to take down any videos at all.

I think the bottom line is that while all studios can partner with YouTube all they want, and they can pom-pom press releases about CBS’s success, ultimately what people want is free stuff.  As internet users get more savvy, YouTube will lose its cachet precisely because of the media restrictions that are placed on it.  Piracy, or rather, totally free episodes, needs to ultimately be viewed and considered as a strategy in and of itself as a way to drive interest and traffic.  Any efforts in stiffling media that wants to be viewed and shared, no matter what your legal or ethical opinions on the matter are, will ultimately be futile.

[SELF PROMO ALERT] Liz Strass from Successful-Blog did an interview we me yesterday thanks to the miracle of Skype (thanks be to Skype!). If you’ve ever wanted to know a thing about me or three, head over to Successful-blog.com, where I detail how I came up with this silly non-sensical name for this blog, what I do for real when not on this blog, and how I got involved in the blogging attempts I do.

[SELF PROMO ALERT 2] I’ve also started working with the open journalism project over at NewAssignment.net, and have contributed my first article, which is a review on MyBlogLog. Bottom line: Me-likey MyBlogLog — it puts a layer of social networking on blogs that tracks bloggers where they go, and conversely, allows you to attach a face and name to who’s going where. With some new privacy controls, it continues to rock. Go MBL, Go!

Last night I had the great pleasure of attending Geek Meeting 3 (or 2.1 … I have trouble keeping count), a semi-regular meeting of local geeks and like minded individuals put together by Mitch Joel of TwistImage. Although it was a much larger shindig than I had initially anticipated (20+ rather than the 8-13), it made for a very lively atmosphere over at La Paletta in Toronto just north of Kensington Market.

I also swiftly learned the shortsightedness of not bringing any business cards (damn that Moo for not sending those cards faster!) or carrying something to write down names, emails and blog URLs — as I met many more people than my fatigue-addled brain can remember. I did get a chance to meet Eli Singer, Michael Seaton[thanks for the podcasting tips!] , Mitch Joel (of course), David Jones, Chris Clarke [a mensch of a guy], and of course Stuart “Stu-tastic” MacDonald, but sadly I remember many more faces than names [maybe Mitch can furnish us with a complete list].

The food was lovely (and French), and the company was equally as sparkling. The most surprising thing I learned last night was exactly how many people already knew my blog — but it was only seconded to how many folks last night were so welcoming to newcomers. Here’s looking towards the next Geek Dinner!

[And maybe next time maybe even Ed Lee will even show up! :)]

So some news this morning that BitTorrent is going the legal. They’ve made partnerships with major media studios so that people will be able to legally purchase and download content via the popular P2P system that is currently soaking up up to 40% of the Internet’s bandwidth at any one time.

This is clearly good news from a legal stand point.

Its also good news from a competition stand point, as anything which drives down prices from Steve Jobs is a good thing.

Some unexpected beneficiaries? People who use illegal networks to download illegal torrents.

How?

Well, although the downloaded movies and television shows will surely have their own version of DRM-’d locked down security, you can bet that as soon as its released — or even before — some enterprising hacker will break that protection.

The result? Nirvana.

(more…)

The BBC reports that there is a push to create an online code of ethics for bloggers. Why? So that there is an attempt to create a sense of accountability and redress for individuals with complaints. Its not really all the worthwhile to discuss whether or not this is a feasible thing — because I don’t see many (any?) bloggers necessarily signing up; without any signing up, there would be no clout to enforce any such code of ethics.

I think what is worthwhile discussing, however, is this notion that the blogosphere is self-regulating; many “a-list’ bloggers contend that the issue of such a code of ethics is moot not only from a feasibility point of view, but also from the notion that anyone can put up a blog to offer a counter opinion.

However, I think this is false, because its based on a two false presumtions: that the attention is equitably shared amongst blogs and that bloggers are reasonable.

#1) Attention isn’t equitable.
The whole notion of the “A-list” blogs irks many (mostly, I think A-list bloggers), but its an indusputable fact — there is a hierarchy to bloggers in every corner of the blogosphere, often governed by the fact that many of them have been the first, or older than other bloggers, but also because many of them offer valuable content that people cannot find elsewhere. They offer genuine a combination of news, entertainment or opinion that is unique — and more often, newsworthy.

The hierarchy exists because attention is divided inequitably. And that’s where presumption A is false. That is, they are precisely “A-list”, because they are commanding more “attention” of more people and readers. And they do this not only because they already have a large readership, but in many cases, because of their own popularity, have been rewarded with many inbound links, and therefore, rank highly in search engine results.

While its easy for anyone to create a blog to voice their own opinion, the fact that there is a huge divide in where attention goes makes it difficult, if not impossible, to create an environment where opinions have equal footing. If no one listens to what you’re saying, or no one can find where your opinion is because your blog doesn’t rank, or ranks poorly, then the fact that anyone can create a blog to compete in dissenting opinion is specious.

Furthermore, what happens if no one believes your blog?

That is to say, presumption B — reasonability. (more…)