All About Content

Dave Sifry has reported on the state of the blogosphere, and folks, the State of the Blogosphere is strong.

He points out that attention has been shifting in the blogosphere. Mainstream media stalwarts like The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post [which he calls the "big head" (in contrast with the "long tail")] continue to dominate, but the long tail of the blogging world goes out to 27.8 million blogs.

Sifry summarized his post in bullet points:

• Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger’s and reader’s minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the “big head” of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
• Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media
• Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
• There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
• Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low - in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as the blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
• The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. [Great, only 19 more links to go.] It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.

In other words, the popular blogs are now more or less seen as legitimate news media. Before you go believing everything you read online though, keep in mind that the traditional news media aren’t always right either. Keep those critical thinking caps on.