March 29, 2004
technorati
Besides my readers, my fave thing on the web is Technorati.
I'm playing around with this idea I call "the death of traffic". Traffic was how we measured website success back in the bad ol' dotcom days.
"We got a million hits in November!"
Eh. Gapingvoid's gotten a million hits in 24 hours. It's no big deal. It's called a "spike"- people come, but then they leave just as quickly.
For the vast majority of us bloggers, what's far more important long-term is what I call "hum". To pass on your link from one person to another requires energy. The more often this happens, the more energy. The more energy, the louder the hum.
And that's what Technorati is good at measuring. "Hum".
Technorati allows you to see who is linking to your blog right now. It gives you as good a snapshot of who's digging your work at this moment in time- who's reading your site, and who's reading their sites. It gives you a real-time quality assessment of your audience.
"Quality" is more important than quantity. As a blogger, you don't need thousands of visitors to validate what you're doing. You just need one or two of the right kind of visitor.
What is the "right kind"? That depends on your own agenda. For me, an advertising hack, the right kind is the person who will offer me a job one day.
And of course, it also does the same for sites similar to your own. Makes it easier to evaluate how well you're faring compared to them, within a certain "space" etc.
Measure your blog by size alone, and you will fail. Measure it by "hum" and you are more likely to succeed. Technorati allows you to do this better than any other tool out there, as far as I know.
Hum, hum, wonderful hum...