For a long time I have wanted to do a Swedish version of the research performed by Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati. He has had some interesting posts about the state of the blogosphere and one of these posts covers Big Media vs. Blogs in terms of inbound sources. He writes:
“The number of people linking to you is a very powerful measurement of your influence or authority with those people – because if nothing else, those people are spending some attention on you. Documents are the exhaust of our attention streams – they are a tangible reflection on what we are spending our time and attention on. Negative attention “I hate such-and-such” runs counter to this theory, but empirical evidence shows that people overwhelmingly link to items and objects that they like or endorse, far more frequently than to things they disapprove of […]”
Sifry’s slides tells us that mainstream media are the websites that most bloggers link to (www.nytimes.com on top), but blogs are not that far behind. I have done a “lite-version” of Sifry’s research and looked at the websites of Swedish mainstream media versus the Swedish blogs with most inbound sources and links. The picture is quite similar, although on a much smaller scale.
The first graph is the number of inbound sources and the top three are the websites of Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter and SVT, but already in third, fourth and fifth place there are blogs, namely 456 Berea Street, How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons and Adland (way to go Roger, Francis and Åsk!). I’m at #13. In the graph below, green is for blogs, purple is for mainstream media.
The second graph counts the number of inbound links.
I don’t claim that this is a 100% accurate ranking since there are probably some blogs out there that would fit on the list, but I’ve missed. But I think it still paints a fairly good picture of the influence blogs have recieved in a short period of time. Some of these blogs didn’t exist 12-18 months ago.
As a reference, here are the number of inbound links from a few other leading publications:
idg.se (44)
di.se (33)
nyteknik.se (32)
tv4.se (27)
computersweden.idg.se (26)
internetworld.idg.se (24)
tt.se (21)
sydsvenskan.se (20)
Footnote: Some results for inbound links may be a bit skewed depending on what URL you type in, like mymarkup.net and mymarkup.net/blog gives vastly different results (301/220 vs 164/141) probably due to the fact that the domain hosts several blogs, so the latter numbers might be the ones that should really be in the graphs above. Some blogs may also get more hits by linking to themselves, but I think it is a minor problem.
