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Blogs: much ado about very little
Excuse me for asking. But why has MSNBC's Keith Olbermann started a blog about politics? Almost no one reads them. These opinion-laden, e-journals draw only fleeting notice from Web surfers. But they have captured the interest of thousands of reporters who have written about bloggers and their supposed impact on the Bush-Kerry campaign. Google News, today, returned almost 4,000 citations for a search using "blog" as the keyword. "The audience reach of even the largest of the political blogs is tiny compared to other major political news sources," said Max Kalehoff, a spokesman for HitWise, a Web traffic measurement and analysis company. In a recent week, traffic to WashingtonPost.com was almost 650 percent greater than that of the most popular such blog.HitWise's rankings of half a dozen blogs tell a very quiet story. The most popular site, DailyKos.com, accounts for .0051 percent of Internet visits each day. (HitWise only reports the percentage of visits to sites/categories versus all Internet visits, or market share, Kalehoff said.) InstaPundit.com was second with .0027 percent. Even the profane and popular Wonkette.com, profiled in The New York Times, Time and the Washington Post, limps in with .0011 percent. The key to blogs' popularity in the media is not the number of readers, it's their quality. "Their collective influence seems to be because a few (writers) have become political insiders and are successfully reaching other key, intensive niche audiences," Kalehoff said. Guess where this piece came from? Give up? CBSMarkwetWatch. Hahahahahahahahahaha! Posted by: growler 2004-10-15 |
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