Blogs beat 'New York Times'

Bloggers, listen up and rejoice: Blog penetration has been achieved!

Huh?

Before you start drifting off into a world of dirty fantasies, take a look at this chart:

This chart shows Canada in the top position for "blog penetration". Simply put this means that 58.2% of internet users visited a site in the "blog category" in October 2006. Blogs, as the study concludes, have therefore gone mainstream.

The Long Now Foundation, which specialises in long-term thinking and related bets, had the following bet running on its website:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

The bet has now been decided in favour of the "predictor", i.e., the author (Dave Winer) of the above statement:

The Long Bets decision on this bet is in favor of Winer’s side, weblog page ranks came out ahead of the NY Times. We will be calculating interest and sending a check on to Dave Winer’s charity of choice the World Wide Web Consortium in the next month.

I could have told them that right from the get-go: My own blogs would always come up in the top 1-5 Google results for any search related to a topic covered on my sites (in many instances, one of my blogs would come up number one) -- my sites are currently somewhat lower in the ranking following recent restructuring and a relaunch (which also resulted in a lot of archived entries getting deleted or assigned new URLs).

The mainstream media (MSM) had better watch their backs.

Hat tip to Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz

Comments

[Simon Owens]

It was kind of an unfair fight, I think. I mean, the New York Times versus the entire blogosphere? They should have done it Newspapers vs. blogs, it would have evened the score.