Tag Archives: Blogs

Quietly influential

Business, Science & Technology, , ,

I chuckle every now and again when I see the MSM reporting on blogs. The usual suspects almost always turn up: TechCrunch, the HuffPo, GigaOM, BuzzMachine — as well as a smattering of the hot blogs du jour. This time it was Steve Rubel’s MicroPersuasion and Passive Aggressive Notes.

I must confess some incredulity, because I have never seen Ars Technica mentioned in a story that focuses specifically on blogs. This despite being relegated to merely a “blog” (albeit acknowledged as an influential one) most of the time by the mainstream media when they reference a story that Ars breaks.

Now, the HuffPo is a huge website. Probably a little bigger than Ars with 5.7M unique readers per month. TechCrunch is markedly smaller, and GigaOM is smaller still (1.37M pageviews/month or so).

It makes me wonder why these particular blogs are chosen. Is it because the stories about blogs are by their nature more noise than substance? Indeed these stories are often widely hyped when they hit and will make their way around the ‘sphere several times before disappearing like yesterday’s newspaper. (The blogosphere echochamber at its finest.) Ars seems to be anti-hype most of the time. It’s been known to take a somewhat dim and sometimes even contrarian view to what’s hot in the blogosphere this week — “The Cloud!“, death by blogging! — if indeed what the blogosphere is focusing on this week is even worth talking about at all. (Usually it’s not.)

So here are some sites that Business Week may want to think about including, because these sites are the real movers and shakers in the Internet publishing world. This list is by no means comprehensive, and I make no comments about their content or quality of the sites, only their size. This list isn’t sorted in any meaningful way:

For comparison, TechCrunch sits at ~7.5M pageviews per month, and Ars Technica sits at ~30M.