Plainfield blogs rank high on the Web

How big is the Web?

Plainfield's blog scene came in for a mention in Mark Spivey's end-of-year technology story last week (see here), leading me to check out how we rank on the Web.

The Plainfield blog scene is truly remarkable, with 16 identifiably authored blogs and counting (plus one more, if you include Bo Vastine -- who lives a couple of doors over the city line in Scotch Plains -- and who comments on the 22nd Legislative District, in which Plainfield is included).

When I told the presenter at a workshop on blogs for Rutgers journalism students some time back that Plainfield had (then) a dozen active blogs, he was amazed at the number. That was then, this is now.

One quibble with the Courier's copy editor (not with Mark, who does not write the headlines or section heads) is the heading 'COMPETING BLOGS'. I really think of us all as complementary, rather than competing. While several of us (Bernice, Olddoc, Piv, myself and the blogging Councilors) cover some of the same turf, each blog has its own voice and view and reading them all will give Plainfielders a pretty rounded view of what's going on in town.

Can we find out how Plainfield's blogs stack up as masters of the (Web) universe?

Kinda, sorta.

There are several problems --

1. First, blogs are websites of a particular kind (usually the effort of a single person, easily but often irregularly updated, mostly non-commercial);
   
   
2. The Web is an ever-changing universe, just like the real one, with new sites and blogs constantly being born even as others die;
   
   
3. This means that stats are literally like frames in a video, changing every moment;
   
   
4. Since the Web is by its very nature decentralized, there is no one central authority for what's going on.

Given these issues, it is still possible to get a meaningful glimpse of how Plainfield's blogs are faring in the overall mix.

First, how big is the Web?

For an answer, I turned to Netcraft (see here), which basically tracks the Web for the types of servers being used, but which has a useful chart --

Netcraft finds an increase of 7 million active sites over the past year, and the chart indicates a total of approximately 72.6 million (72,600,000) active websites (the total of registered websites is on the order of 240 million). That's quite a few needles in the haystack.

All well and good, but can we find out where Plainfield's blogs stand in the mix?

The service which I use is Alexa, a free ranking rating tool that bloggers can install to monitor their traffic and that of other sites or blogs in which they are interested (see here; for a peek at rankings without the bother of installing the tool, see Evrsoft's search page here).

Be aware that Alexa and other site trackers (like comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen Interactive and Quantcast) are businesses vying with each other and each snipes at the other about its accuracy. Among the factors that enter into a site's ranking are the frequency of posting, numbers of unique visitors, numbers of pages viewed, and links to and from other websites. For our purposes, Alexa is considered 'one of the most accurate FREELY AVAILABLE tools' for ranking sites', as Evrsoft says.

Hedged about with all these caveats, what I found on the eve of the New Year is that Plainfield blogs line up in a range (LOWER numbers indicate HIGHER TRAFFIC) from 621,001 to 9.6 million, with the middle of the pack in the 800,000+ range. Plainfield's blog contingent is DEFINITELY NOT shabby. (For a little context, consider these traffic rankings: Courier News [38,749], Star-Ledger [2,431] and New York Times [97].)

Here's a chart --

BLOG	OWNER	TRAFFIC RANKING**
CLIPS	Dan Damon	621,001
Plainfield Today	Dan Damon	627,990
Plainfield Plaintalker	Bernice Paglia	789,367
Plainfield Sports News	Augustine Dashiell	807,079
Jerry Green's Page	Asm Jerry Green	811,741
Doc's Potpourri	Harold S. Yood, MD	813,064
Maria's Blog	Maria Pellum	825,574
Piv For Plainfield	Jim Pivnichny	842,687
Mapping It Out	Adrian Mapp	864,233
For Good Government	Cory Storch	869,880
Positive Change	Annie McWilliams	873,531
As I See It	Rashid Burney	873,532
The (TV) Show Must Go On	Jackie Schnoop	1,669,153
PEPTalk: Revisited	Renata Hernandez	5,006,907
Confessions of a Bathrobe Blogger	Rebecca Williams	8,037,864
Dottie G Sez	Dottie Gutenkauf	9,681,343
**As measured on ALEXA, 12/31/2009.

Keep in mind that on any given day, a blog's traffic may spike considerably: Plainfield Today's traffic shot up nearly tenfold when I posted about PolitickerNJ's overnight decision to go from FREE to $1,800/year for access (see here; the story was of intense interest to the NJ blogosphere). I also noted on Jackie's TV blog that her December 20 post Survivor: Samoa's season finale (see here) garnered an amazing 228 comments, leaving the rest of us to eat our hearts out.

While we're talking Plainfield blogs, please note that I am adding Dottie Gutenkauf's blog, Dottie G Sez, to the daily list (thanks to Dr. Yood for bringing it to folks' attention; please drop by and check it out), which also includes Rebecca Williams' Confessions of a Bathrobe Blogger, Jackie Schnoop's The (TV) Show Must Go On, and Renata Hernandez' PEPTalk: Revisited (where today she announces her candidacy for the Board of Ed).

Anyone with thoughts to share should consider this invigorating pasttime.

Come on in, the water's fine!

---

• Courier: "The age of multitasking" -- Pertinent section is on page 2.
• Netcraft: "December 2009 Server Survey" -- Most current stats on Web size.
• Alexa: "Alexa: The Web Information Company"
  

-- Dan Damon [follow]

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