The Reg's readership is huge, Andrew's not taking the piss out of weblogs because he's trying to bump up his linkage, trust me. It's absurd to suggest it. A recent link to Mobitopia from Andrew shunted more than 3000+ readers to my website within 24 hours, as many hits as my last Slashdotting (though more spread out, thank god). A link from Dave Winer will net about 250-300 links for comparision purposes. The Reg gets hundreds of millions of page hits a month - the links from blogs don't even get noticed by them. It's classic weblog arrogance to think it would.

Andrew is a good guy who's simply trying to point out the obvious hype and giving a good poke to the leading hypester. You have to admit there were *a lot* of upper class white guys at Bloggercon talking garbage about new democracy and good and evil, etc. Have you ever *seen* so many new Powerbooks?

:-)

-Russ

I have to agree with Russell. I know Andy Orlowski, and although there's an element of mischief in him he's basically trying to pop the hype bubble surrounding blogging. Someone's got to do it, and it might as well be him.

I don't know if I'd agree with "Andrew is a good guy" considering the style of attacks he makes, but I guess that's a matter of opinion. I do think that traffic and googlejuice are very different. The Register might drive a lot of traffic, Google doesn't measure traffic. The Register has 22,500 inbound links on google, I have 12,100 and scripting has 38,200. The total inbound links is not an exact measure of page ranking, but it obviously has some relationship. Getting bloggers to link to you is still a great way to increase your googlejuice.

I think Andrew is hilarious. He exagerates, but if it stings a little, it's because it rings true. If there were no truth at all in what he says, it wouldn't offend ... it would just seem nutty (like this guy, who thinks Stephen King killed John Lennon).

The comment by the poster above about the Powerbooks was funny. I looked at those pix and the first thing I noticed was all the dorks staring at computer screens--every single attendee. I guess I don't attend these kind of geeky conferences ... why don't the presenters start off by asking people to shut down their computers and turn off their cell phones, or go out in the hallway if they need to use them? How rude!

Inbound links to a media site can't be compared to inbound links to a blog. Blog's raison d'etre is seemingly to generate mutual inbound links. Media sites, on the other hand, get bookmarked in your browser, not linked to from public pages.

Andrew seems to point out the Blog Emperor's obvious lack of clothing. Jim Moore seems like he is denying the circle jerk nature of blogs while at the same time confirming it. This here fancy version of guestbook.cgi is cute and all but the hype is way out of proportion. A $500/head convention for people who insist on making their diaries public? I wish I had thought of that! I bet stuff like that is about the only money being made in this chunk of the Net.

Caitlin,

Any time I have to do any public speaking of any kind, I ask that all electronics be switched off or set to silent mode. Back in the old days of pagers, this was known as "set phasers to stun". Unfortunately now that everyone and their dog in Tokyo has a ring tone on their keitei, people think I'm the rude one for suggesting such a thing.

I don't see why inbound links to a media site should not be compared to inbound links to a blog when the original discussion was about Google which primarily looks at links?

Thanks for signing my guestbook Chris. ;-p

Joi,

The point on links is that most links to blogs ... are on other blogs. Which are spiderable ... since they are public pages. Which Google looks at. If there is no robots.txt file.

Most links to major media sites are in the readers' bookmarks files for their browsers ... which cannot be crawled by Google (well, maybe if the readers are running Windows without the security patches, they can be ).

The NY Times doesn't even have 50,000 inbound links on Google. Surely you don't think Winer has the same audience as the NY Times, do you? But by your "links:" method, they come out about the same.

This is a social phenomenon, not a technological one. It just so happens that people don't make web pages to put links to the NY Time on, even though they read it. Bloggers do link to blogs with blogrolls and in an automated fashion with trackbacks. Thus artificially inflating the importance of blogs and screwing up Google for the rest of us. Which is Orlowski's point, beneath the sarcasm.

There are more sophisticated ways of estimating the sorts of things you are trying to estimate. Wanna sign an NDA. ;-)

Oh, BTW, you need to count both link:www.domain.com and link:domain.com to get all the links on Google--it doesn't combine subdomains.

Cailtin, I'm not asserting that Winer has the same audience as the NY Times. I'm just saying that getting linked to by sites that have a lot of inbound links is an easy way to get googlejuice. That's all.

We're all talking to the big media sites about making their articles easier to link to. IE permalinks. Many of the big media sites are working on ways to create more easily linked to and spidered sites. If the media sites become easier to link to, I'm sure the number of people linking to them will increase and will also increase their googlejuice.

This desire to be linked to is looking a bit like the kid who cries out "mommy lookit me". Of course everyone who publishes pages on the web wants them to be found and read, but there is a point where it looks more like a desperate cry for attention.

"Google juice"? Who cares? I can understand why it would be nice if the NYT made it easier to link to articles, but do you think they actually care about how many people link to them or how hard it is to find them on Google? Also since the NYT and other major media sites make money by selling access to their archives, why would they want to add permalinks?

"I don't see why inbound links to a media site should not be compared to inbound links to a blog" -- well... maybe because there is a genuine difference between a media site and a blog? How many blogs are associated with revenue generating media? How many blogs could actually move to a pay to access model? When you come right down to it, how many blogs even provide any actuall content rather than just links to content and maybe opinions about that content?

"do you think they actually care about how many people link to them or how hard it is to find them on Google?"

If they don't want people reading their site, why do they bother with the time, money and effort to build and maintain it?