Beware this link, for it will automatically full width your browser (assuming you don't surf with it full screen width already), but
it's definitely worth a look. It's a chart of most of the top blogs online, of every type, mapped along an XY axis. From News to Opinion, and from Scurrilous to Earnest. Usual distinctions such as right wing and left wing are irrelevant, what's ranked is the content and the delivery style. I am familiar with most of the 60ish blogs listed, and I can't really quibble with too many of the placements. The whole list is pressure mapped, so you can hover on every logo for a clickable link with a capsule description to boot.
The main point of contention over this is, I suppose, the scurrilous/earnest metric. I'd put a number of the blogs they have to the right (earnest) further left (scurrilous). Michelle "Stalkin" Malkin, for instance, with her perpetual attacks on anyone (which means almost everyone) to the ideological left of her, and the shameful way she goes about them; posting
people's home addresses and phone numbers so her crazed readers will harass and threaten them, digging through people's trash and
peeking into their windows to try and discredit them, etc. Those actions are far more scurrilous than the Fug Girls snarking on whatever beglittered trash bag one of the interchangeable, unnecessary, and shapeless Olsen Twins is wearing this week. On the other hand, Malkin (and the other political sites) are quite earnest about their scurrilousness, so maybe it's more about the attitude of the bloggers their style? So if the Fug Girls stopped making jokes, and solely delved into serious analysis of the clothing various celebrities stumbled along red carpets in, would they swing all the way to the right on the Earnest axis?
Another nitpick of the list; that they apparently cherry-picked the list to get blogs that could be firmly categorized, and by extension ignored some popular ones that were too hard to slot into a specific location. This blog is infinitely far from the popularity required to merit inclusion on such a list, but if BlackChampagne were listed, where would it go? I sometimes post news, but when I do I always include much opinion about it, and while I often write about scurrilous topics, I'm usually quite earnest about them.
To expand on that concept, perhaps that's a lesson for bloggers wanting to build a more popular blog? You need a brand of some sort; a market identity. And you're unlikely to get that covering everything under the sun, since even if you cover it well (not that I'm saying I do) half your readers will still skip half the entries. This could probably be made up for by sheer quantity, so people could pick and choose what they read and find your site worth a visit even if they skipped half the updates, but even then you'd probably be more popular just posting one half, or the other. Imagine a site that was half crazy celebrity gossip, ala Perez Hilton, and half dry, studied journalism, ala Media Matters? Who would view that sort of digital schizophrenia? More importantly for traffic, who would link to it?
Labels: blogs
