Across the pond

Just checked my blog readership figures. According to my service provider, 1and1, I had 1653 page views last Friday, which is my best ever. The total according to 1and1 since 1 January 2007 is now 373,561. I then checked the figures according to WordPress, whose service I use to put out my blog. They recorded 365,032 since 4 January 2007, which is not much different. So at least these two companies agree, so presumably the figures mean something.

I then checked my ratings with Technorati, which anyone can use to find anyone else’s blog ratings. I keyed in www.thedailynovel.com and was ranked 8,911,336 in the world league. Clearly I have a long way to go before I get into the Premier League. I have been using thedailynovel address for well over twelve months, but I started the blog as www.xcitybob.com, which I still own and use. So my blogs go out under that name as well. If I key that address into technorati, my ranking rises to 629,416.

To get some idea of where I stood in relation to others I looked at the Technorati ratings for three City University colleagues. Andrew Grant Adamson (who has since moved to the University of Westminster) ranks at 154,301. My head of department, Adrian Monck, comes in at 50,250. But way ahead of all of us is Roy Greenslade, unsurprisingly because as well as being a part-time Professor of Journalism at City University, does the main media blog for Guardian Unlimited. He is number 12,250 in the world blogging league.

Now that is really puzzling, because I distinctly remember a recent blog by Greenslade reporting that The Guardian techies had told him that he had scored 80,000 hits in 2007, which is way below my figures according to 1and1 and WordPress.

To add to my confusion I came across a blog written by Monck last November in which he recorded the top ten journalism bloggers according to Google Reader. In Monck’s league table Greenslade comes out top with 194 RSS feeds and Grant Adamson comes sixth with 65 feeds.

This discrepancy clearly arises because all these different companies are using different criteria.

But these results confirm my own impression that citizen journalists are not taking over the world.

Rather the opposite. Since the many articles written about the rise of the citizen bloggers, which were filling the newspapers and the web a year or so ago, the newspapers have redoubled their efforts in web journalism. The Guardian still probably leads, scoring around 13 million hits the last figure I remember seeing. But The Daily Telegraph and Times Online and The Daily Mail are snapping at the Guardian’s heels.

In a comment posted on Monck’s November blog an ex-City student, Tom Whitwell, came up with his own list of top journalist bloggers.

This is just an early morning stab at a big question, or rather series of questions.

What proportion of the blog readership is held by the world’s mainstream media organisations?

Is the rise and rise of Obama in part a reflection of his message being spread on the web by those millions of young Americans who support him and who all come from the internet generation?

Enough for one morning. I have to get back to my main job, which is getting my house on Lyme Bay, ready for the grandchildren, who will shortly be descending upon me with their buckets and spades.