In the world of blogging, as with most everything else, ranking matters. It is convenient shorthand to see who is the best, biggest, worst, smallest, etc. And as one editor once confided in me, stories with headlines that list and rankings sell more magazines.
Technorati rankings have become a near obsession for a lot of bloggers, and Technorati's top 100 blog list is a blogosphere industry standard. And now there is a new kid on the block, The Techmeme Leaderboard, which lists the sources most frequently posted to Techmeme. As Jason Kaneshiro observed, the blogging elite now have another hurdle to overcome on Techmeme.
According to Techmeme, sources on the Leaderboard are ranked by "presence," the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period. "Discussion" links are not taken into considerationâ€" only full headlines are counted.
It is a mixture of traditional and new media, and as Scott Karp points out, it's dominated by media brands like TechCrunch, GigaOm and Engadget. There are very few "blogs" on in the "traditional" sense, i.e. a SINGLE voice, like Dave Winer or Jeff Jarvis.
Announced earlier this week, Leaderboard has generated a fair amount of media and blogging interest.
So as budding or jaded PR professionals, what should we make of it? For one, it does represent a fairly accurate reflection of the most influential blogs and news sites out there. And according to Techmeme, "it reflects the reality that both blog-driven sites and traditional sites define today's news, so use it to discover new sources, recommend sites to others, or illustrate where tech news breaks."
My take is that rankings are a useful guide but PR professionals can't live on presence and influence alone. Brian Solis reminds readers that you can't ignore the "Magic Middle" (bloggers who have from 20 to 1000 other people linking to them) of the attention curve who help carry information and discussions among your customers.
Numbers just don't always tell the whole story. Chuck Tanowitz correctly adds that sometimes it is who links to you and not how many - especially if those limited few carry a fair amount of clout.
Nor is targeting the top bloggers a substitute for a carefully planned, nuanced media/blogger outreach effort. The news itself must go hand in hand with the source and author. When identifying reporters and bloggers to pitch to, I consider the news I am pitching, the source, and the author.
And so with Techmeme's Leaderboard, we have a new way to rank sites in the blogosphere, and Technorati has a new source of competition. Care to rank predictions on who comes out on top?
Technorati Tags: Techmeme; Technorati; Leaderboard; Rankings;
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