The Wardman Wire

This is the third of a series articles commenting on the possible expansion of the Labour Blogosphere during 2007, following Mike Ion’s recent Comment is Free Column “Power Bloggers”.

This article looks at the party political “home” blogs using Technorati and Google data. This article focuses mainly on the numbers.

(Image credit: Dorking Labs.)

Comparing the Grassroots Blogs

In the UK each of the main parties has blogs that are designed to be rallying and conversations points for activists. These blogs are the subject of this article.

Before you start, it is worth reading these definitions once. The data was collected in March 2007, as part of a survey of recent data for 100 of the blogs from the UK Political Blogging guide published by Iain Dale.

I’ll be comparing these sites: Lib Dem Voice (LDV), Conservative Home (CH) and Labour Home (LH). If any of my information is inaccurate, I welcome corrections (in the comments below or via the Contact Page). The basic data is in the table below.

The most glaring point is how far Conservatime Home is ahead of the other two on these figures. The Google backlinks figures may be higher partly due to the age of Conservative Home. I am always surprised by the effect that sheer age has on the importance of a blog as assessed bby Google. That is not the case for the “Technorati Links” figures - as these only take the previous 180 days into account.

This gap is there for both the Technorati figures (which relate to links mainly within the blogosphere), and to the Google figures (which give a better indication of visibility of the site to the wider internet).

In the run up to a general election, a lower visibility in Google could reduce the visibility of a political website to the general public - although this effect would depend on the source of the traffic to the website. If any of the sites featured are willing to supply a breakdown of their traffic date - e.g., the amount coming from direct links vs search engines - I would be interested in including the comparison in a future article.

I suggest that the Lib Dems and Labour sites are going to have a tough time getting on terms in much less than a full year - and they might struggle to do it by the next election, even if New Labour wait until the last possible moment.

It is instructive to compare two of the most popular political blogs. Data is from March 2007. Figures in brackets are the equivalent from September 2006, taken from here.

* Although the blog started in 2002, postings before December 2003 vanished into the “Blogger Bermuda Triangle”.

The big change over the last 12 months has been a 600% increase in Iain’s traffic. His technorati ranking (which is based on links created in the previous 180 days) has responded rapidly. The Google rank figures - by contrast - change (either up or down) at a far slower rate.

Warning: Harry’s Place is using a Sitemeter webcounter, which since late March has been placing third party tracking cookies on visitors’ PCs without notice. This may (or may not) be an issue for you. I dumped Site Meter from this blog this morning.

Tags: Political Blogging, Labour Bloggers, Labourhome, Mike Ion, Blogosphere, Politics, Matt Wardman, Tim Montgomery, Jag Singh, LabourHome, ConservativeHome, LibDemVoice, Harrys Place, Iain Dale

[tags]Political Blogging, Labour Bloggers, Labourhome, Mike Ion, Blogosphere, Politics, Matt Wardman, Tim Montgomery, Jag Singh, LabourHome, ConservativeHome, LibDemVoice, Harrys Place, Iain Dale[/tags]