Too Many Clogs In The Works

Google (you know, the search engine company) has its own blog. It recently published its stats for the last year. It had 15 million page views from 7.6 million different visitors. Not bad – although these very large numbers still only earned the company 16th place in the Technorati blog league.

My own blog has only been going for three months and I have little idea what my stats are. I know it has had something around 1,200 page views but how many unique visitors generated them I wonder. I know my rank on Technorati though, it’s 1,574,145. Now this might look bad but I’m actually quite pleased. Yes, there are 1,574,144 blogs more popular than mine but there are also about 53,425,855 blogs less popular! (Web numbers are sort of like real numbers but with more zeroes on the end.)

That puts my blog in the top 3% of blogs worldwide! Isn’t that staggering?

(I wonder what the blog is like that has the Technorati rank of 55,000,000… It must be fascinating.)

I mention the Google stats because I just read an article about it in TechCrunch – one of my favourite online magazines. The article’s a bit geeky so I wouldn’t recommend it. Basically, it was complaining that the Google blog wasn’t a real blog because it doesn’t allow its readers to post comments. I don’t see this as a big issue myself. A blog to me is just someone’s ramblings. It doesn’t have to be interactive - although it’s better if it is.

The real problem with the Google blog – and with all corporate blogs – is that they are really just advertising material for the corporation. They’re more like press releases than blogs as such. Which is OK. In fact these product-related blogs (‘plogs’ I’ve heard them called) can be full of useful information. If you own the product or use it a lot, a plog can be full of hints and tips, news about fixes and upgrades and so on. But they’re not actually blogs. In fact, corporate blogs (‘clogs’?) are noticeably devoid of opinions, singularly lacking in comment and analysis, and do not critique. Which, to me, are all the valuable bits that you get in real blogs.

So it’s a shame that all these plogs and clogs are packing the top ranks of the Technorati league table. If they got their own league, or were redefined out of the blogsphere, maybe a blog like mine could one day nudge above that magical 1.5 million mark.