Measuring the audience in the Now Media environment is challenging. Accuracy in the virtual world is an abstract where a single “reader” may actually be an aggregator that services 0 to x readers. One solution has been to count the number of times a blog is referenced by other blogs.
Services like Technorati purport to determine authority by measuring gravitas through blog links. However, I’ve found Technorati to be dismal in this regard, especially in the last year as it ignores links from major to so not-so major blogs caught by Google Alerts. Pinging Technorati with urls that linked to MountainRunner were seemingly ignored.
It has gotten so bad that I simply do not trust Technorati to show me links or ‘authority’.
This issue becomes more prominent when network maps are based Technorati.
End rant.
You’re not wrong. Technorati has become woefully unreliable in many respects the last six months or so. Their services outages are frequent, which doesn’t help, but their capacity for dishing up even vaguely accurate metrics is seriously sub-par. There are alternatives (IceRocket, for example) but none seem to have the purported reach of Technorati. I’m sure someone’s working on a new service but I don’t know of one.
On a similar note, Feedburner stats have dropped by 50% since converting to Feedburner.Google over the weekend. They are climbing back, although the badge doesn’t show it. It has also become apparent the count does not include email subscribers, which I thought it did. The Smith-Mundt feed, for example, shows 102 subscribers and a 149 email subscribers (17 more than MountainRunner’s email subscriptions).