The Wardman Wire

I posted a short piece about the Guardian Media Top 100 yesterday mentioning Guido, and the obligatory link back to the “Newsnight experience”. [Update: no I didn't; it stuck in the system. Sorry.]

During the skewering of Guido, Jeremy Paxman said:

Facts are treated very loosely in the blogosphere, aren’t they?

This cuts both ways, especially when numbers are involved - we all need to get the facts straight.

So let’s have the final visit to the Sunday Independent’s article a couple of weeks ago about web statistics to see an example of “facts treated very loosely in the media”.

Joy Lo Dico: 460,000+ Technorati Reactions prove Guardian Website Authority

Joy Lo Dico cites Technorati “Reactions” as proof of both the “engagement” and “authority” of the Guardian website:

In another way of cutting the statistics, Technorati, a blog indexer, notes that there have been over 460,000 blog reactions to Guardian articles, proving both engagement in its output and its authority. The Telegraph and the Mail Online do not reach half those figures, and the Sun only around 60,000.

It’s these kind of statistics that may fare better as advertisers start to look for readership quality as well as raw numbers. Next year the Joint Industry Committee for Internet Measurement Systems, made up of advertising and online publishers, will launch a system of data analysis more akin to the National Readership Survey than the ABCs. It will also focus entirely on the UK.

This is the type of skating over the surface and failing to dig for the facts of which Bloggers are often accused; I see it just as much in the papers.

Errr … Oh No They Don’t !

We can scratch the surface of the “460,000+ blog reactions to guardian.co.uk” by looking at a random sample - say the last 50 “reactions” on Technorati. If we do that it takes about 15 seconds to the surface and find out why the raw figure is useless as a measure of authority - at least without a lot more analysis.

The crucial point is to find out who it is doing the reacting.

Here’s the first screenshot - of the Guardian.co.uk technorati home page, you can see 486,664 “blog reactions” if you click through to the full screenshot. You can look at past reactions by clicking on “view all” and then going backwards using the arrows.

Here are the last 5 screenshots, taken yesterday (10am 16 July 2008):

Check these screenshots above, and you will see that:

• 5 of these 50 “blog reactions” are from blogs hosted on guardian.co.uk itself.
• For good measure another is from my own www.politics-daily.co.uk site.

A quick scan indicates a number of others that *look* like scrapers or aggregators of various kinds.

I did the same thing two weeks ago, and that sample yielded 9 “blog reactions” from guardian.co.uk.

They are Behind You !

It looks as though at least 10-20% of these blog reactions being internal references or automated references by other websites. It may be the case that if we analyse a large sample of references to the website, and then compare the sample with similar samples about other websites, we will reach this conclusion.

But the bald statement:

There have been over 460,000 blog reactions to Guardian articles, proving both engagement in its output and its authority.

is a simplistic over-interpretation of a crude headline figure.

For heaven’s sake, this morning this blog has gone over 10,000 “reactions” on Technorati, many of which come from a small number of aggregators I run, my RSS feed being used in the sidebar of other blogs, and all sorts of other sources which need to be regarded as noise in conversations about “authority” or “engagement”.

There’s an amusing political parallel here, in that some politicians do exactly the same thing - generate a lot of noise referring to themselves in the belief that that will somehow make us think that they are important. In fact it can be a good way of identifying “the tosser within”.

Happing Ending?

I’m not suggesting that the Guardian authority is overstated more than other papers, although its larger website may have that effect. It happens with all of them.

I am pointing out 2 things:

a) That this use of Technorati Statistics in this way is mistaken / wrong / silly (choose your word), and does nothing for the reputation of either the author or the newspaper concerned.

b) That this is an example of a national newspaper committing the sin that is held up as the typical behaviour of “bloggers”.

It’s probably going to be like pulling teeth from a grumpy, starving, crocodile getting them to admit it, but the media actually needs quite a few bloggers if they are to get the specialist reporting right, and it’s about time that anyone stopped pretending that they don’t.

And then we can move on to persuading newspapers (such as the Mail) to stop stealing other people’s work as a matter of policy (hint: it is illegal):

We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their author

and to persuading (all of them) to start acknowledging their sources properly.

I haven’t dealt with “engagement” as a quality measurable by Technorati statistics, but many of the same points apply - it may be provable, but it needs a proper analysis rather than a shot from the hip and a sweeping assumption.

Post Script

I was planning a further post concerning this statement by Joy Lo Dico in the same article (but I’ll do it here instead):

The Guardian lost 1.2 per cent of its unique users in May but year-on-year has added 14.1 per cent without the aid of “link-bait” of the order of Perez Hilton or Ronaldo in anything less than a football strip.

Guardian? No linkbait? What on earth is Polly Toynbee for, then?

And so to breakfast.