Bloggers vs. big media

As a journalist who likes to hang with coders (we both share a streak of the social outlaw), a couple of months back I drove into San Francisco to attend the first-ever Technorati Developers Salon.

The highlight of the evening was when Dave Sifry projected a PowerPoint chart that blew me away: a comparison of how many people in the blogosophere linked to news sites vs. other bloggers. I wanted to publish the chart right then and there, but Technorati decided to hold back the details -- until now.

Last night the Online Journalism piece published my latest story, about why an increasing number of readers trust bloggers over mainstream journalists. The transparency of blogs is a major factor in engendering trust.

But what I really want to show you is this chart: Who has the ear of the blogosphere? The chart, which hasn't appeared anywhere else on the Web, maps out the influence of big media vs. bloggers in a visually stunning way. (If you want to drill down deeper, I posted the raw numbers here.)

You’ll find the usual suspects at the top of the heap: the New York Times, CNN, BBC News and Washington Post draw more inbound links than anyone else. But scan down a bit and you see that BoingBoing and Instapundit draw attract more links than Slate, Fox News, SFGate and Reuters (and thus generate more conversation -- the lingua franca of the Web).

Fark, Andrew Sullivan, Talking Point Memo and Scripting News attract more links than the LA Times or ESPN. Atrios' Eschaton, the Daily Kos and WilWheaton.net draw more links than MTV -- or the White House.

Meantime, mainstream news publications like the Dallas Morning News (No. 445) and the Miami Herald (No. 81) are wayyyy down the list -- or not even on the list (the New Republic).

In the article, Technorati CEO David Sifry gets it right, I think: "The Web is not chiefly about a library or a news stand. You have to start thinking about the Web as this humongous event stream. The Web is a set of ongoing conversations that weave together into this new kind of omnipresent social fabric."

Increasingly, we’re going online to engage with others, to hang out at the virtual corner bar -- to have a conversation.

That spells bad news for media outlets that continue to lecture users rather than engage us in a true dialogue.

Posted by jdlasica, August 12, 2004 07:10 PM | | TrackBack