April 23, 2006
@ 06:59 AM
Comments [5]
Don't Hate, Congratulate

I've posted a number of blog  entries in the past about how popular various blogs on MSN Spaces are, especially the Asian ones. Unsurprisingly it's taken some of the folks from the insular geek blog set, a while to notice this trend. Recently, Scott Karp wrote about this in a blog post entitled Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically which was followed up by a blog post entitled Get on MSN Spaces in Asia and watch the link-love pile up. Sort of by Chris Edwards.

Both blog posts are interesting because the authors refuse to believe that it is possible for blogs they haven't heard of from Asian countries like China and Japan to be more popular than A-list technology bloggers like Dave Winer. In his post, Chris Edwards points out that the incoming links for blogs like M¥$ŤěяĬǾũ§ ĢÎѓĻ contain blogs that only link to the Space via the Recently Updated Spaces module. On an initial glance this seems to be true. When Technorati first started tracking MSN Spaces we realized this module would be a problem and added rel='nofollow' on all links to spaces from this module. This means that search engines and web crawlers should not consider these links as 'votes' for the site for page ranking purposes.

Ignoring that particular space, there are still a number of spaces in the Technorati Top 100 whose most recent links don't come from the Recently Updated Spaces module. For example, check out the incoming links to http://spaces.msn.com/MSN-SA, http://spaces.msn.com/atiger and http://spaces.msn.com/members/thespacecraft (MSN Spaces team blog).

As much as it seems to bother some technology geeks, a number of blogs hosted on MSN Spaces are more popular than so-called A-list technology bloggers.


 

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Sunday, 23 April 2006 13:42:12 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
[How many versions of this blog are there? This has been cross posted from the version at MSN Spaces.]

Did you actually read the blog posts? I can understand someone taking away from mine that I didn't believe blogs from Asia would push a bunch of technoblogs off the A-list. But Scott Karp's post was written from the point of view that the rise of non-US, non-tech blogs was inevitable.

I just found myself suspicious of the way in which blogs no-one had heard of had suddenly amassed thousands of trackbacks. Indeed, Technorati seems to have been listing links without filtering out standard web-page cruft and boilerplate. I haven't done an analysis of the sites you cite, but one of them (atiger) has a lot of links from users' lists pages rather than from blog posts. As I understand it, those custom lists are equivalent to blogrolls, which you would normally expect a blog search to tune out.

Also, it seems that all three of the ones you mention are actually tech blogs.* So, I guess A-list tech bloggers are going to be around for a while longer. But, I'm only too happy to welcome a more balanced international list as it arrives. I'd simply rather that blog search engines fix their filters to make sure it is a level playing field before rolling out the red carpet.

* After a bit of further checking, I take it back about Space Alliance being a tech blog. I guess that's one advantage of posting this twice.
Chris Edwards
Sunday, 23 April 2006 14:18:22 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I investigated the MSN Spaces blogs in the Technorati 100 and it appears Technorati is counting the rel='nofollow' links in their rankings. Unbelievable!
Randy Charles Morin
Sunday, 23 April 2006 17:25:49 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Chris,
Technorati counts links in blog rolls on MovableType and WordPress blogs. I don't see why there is anything wrong with doing the same for blogs on MSN Spaces. Or are you disagreeing with using blogrolls for calculating who should get in the Technorati Top 100.
Dare Obasanjo
Sunday, 23 April 2006 20:15:42 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I wasn't aware that blogroll linked were counted, I have to confess. I hadn't noticed any coming in to mine that were counted (it's not many, but that makes them easy to count). Because the MSN blogs were added only recently, the blogroll links stand out much more than with MT or WP blogs that have been tracked for many months. But, if the same techniques are used to track all those different types of blogs, that is reasonable

I think using blogrolls is bad for calculating a Top 100 position within Technorati because it started off using pings to detect links - how many times do you count the blogroll on the page that appears with each link? It seems easier to leave them out completely. If Technorati is moving toward a spidering model (which seems to be the case and it sensible if the aim is to track all blogs rather than just those that have heard of the site) then maybe tracking blogrolls will make more sense.
Chris Edwards
Monday, 24 April 2006 10:45:06 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
hehe, "...blogs no-one had heard of..." - 'no-one' being people you know as against the billions you don't know?

Perhaps everyone is reading too much into Technorati, although their bug has raised an amusing conversation. I see a lot of dented egos are starting to sigh with relief that yes, they ARE that important afterall(in Technorati).
Doug
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