Above is the latest chart from Technorati, taken from David Sifry’s semi-annual State of the Blogosphere report released this week, charting the number of inbound links to mainstream news sites vs. top blogs. Fewer blogs there than in past comparisons. From Saturday’s NY Times:
“The State of the Blogosphere” presented at sifry.com this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog search site, shows just how complicated things have become. According to Mr. Sifry’s data, mainstream media sites, as measured by the number of blogs linking to them, are trouncing news-oriented blogs by a growing margin. Bloggers link to The New York Times Web site about three times as often as they link to the technology-oriented Boingboing.net. Only four blogs show up in the top 33 sites.
But it isn’t the data or the rankings that matter most here. More interesting is that it’s becoming hard to tell what is a blog and what is mainstream media.
Mr. Sifry calls Boingboing a blog — and so it is. But it also does some original reporting, and has professional journalists on its staff. And oddly, Mr. Sifry calls Slashdot (slashdot.com), a technology site with material created mostly by users, a mainstream site.
Meanwhile, more and more mainstream media sites are blogging. In the end, users are most likely drawn to sites for the quality and trustworthiness of the material presented.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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