Tag Archives: Technorati

| Media, Web design

CBC #37 worldwide for blog media links

Technorati, the service that monitors blogs and tells them whether they’re cool or not, has released a list of the 50 media websites bloggers link to the most. (Via TechCrunch)

YouTube, unsurprisingly, tops the list, followed by the New York Times, BBC and CNN.

The only Canadian media outlet on the list is CBC.ca, coming in at #37. This is unsurprising since CBC has been investing in its Internet sites longer than the private media, and it has national television, radio and Internet sites to fuel its news-gathering operation. Plus it has dozens of RSS feeds sorted by topic, an iPhone version of its website (and separate mobile version), it’s got Twitter, and it has a news ticker people can add to their blogs.

I also like the fact that news stories (which are all open to comments) use Technorati to link to blogs that link back to those stories, which drives (some) traffic to those blogs and makes them (slightly) more likely to link to CBC than another website with the same story.

If other Canadian online news outlets want to match that, they should start copying some of those features.

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing

On being a B-list blogebrity

Navel-gaze with me for a moment.

B-listI checked my Technorati rating yesterday and noticed that I’m above the 100 authority level for the first time (111, exactly half that of my hero Patrick Lagacé). That level, according to this hyper-scientific calculation system, makes me a B-list blogebrity.

That sounds cool and all, but I’m still ranked 58,325, and I don’t think B-list celebrities have 58,325 people more important than them.

What gets me more is the words used to describe this blog in the local blogosphere, where I imagine the name carries a bit more weight because I focus on local issues. Small things like saying “un site plus connu” or “un influent blogueur” boost my ego enough to almost forget about the fact that I’m not paid a penny to do this (yet).

Of course, quite a bit of my Technorati rating comes from automated spam blogs that link to whichever of my posts contain their magic keyword, hoping for trackbacks that’ll send eyeballs to their ad-ridden sites.

Going through my logs, it seems apparent that I have some regular readers. About 50 or so subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed through Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines or other similar services, and more visit the site the old-fashioned way, through bookmarks, memorizing the URL or Googling “fagstein”. Many others get here through search engine searches for things that nobody else has written about. The rest are Google’s indexing bot.

So to you human readers I say thank you for reading. If I can’t have modest riches, at least I can have modest fame.

I expect the red carpet treatment at Yulblog this week. (Even though I’ll probably be at Pecha Kucha instead)

Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging. (This week’s geography trivia question is still open, with an added hint.)