The Magic Middle

So Dave Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere is out, and there’s a lot of interesting stats. Personally, I find these numbers fascinating. Like, for example, the notion of “The Magic Middle”:

At Technorati, we define this to be the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. As the chart above shows, there are about 155,000 people who fit in this group. And what is so interesting to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these blogs often are.

As someone who apparently sits in this Magic Middle, I was happy to know I’m interesting, exciting, informative, and witty! Thanks Dave!

I thought I’d check the Technorati raings on a bunch of the blogs I subscribe to in NetNewsWire and wouldn’t you know it, almost three quarters of them are in the Magic Middle. One observation I’ll make is that blogs sitting in this segment often have the best comments. There’s enough traffic for conversation and debate to get started, but not enough that the noise overwhelms. Interesting segment of the blogosphere indeed.

On a side note, I had the opportunity to chat with Kevin Marks at Northern Voice on the weekend. There’s a guy who likes stats! It was nice to talk about some indexing challenges they’re seeing compared to the issues I’m facing indexing mountains of genomics data. They largely seem to have the basic indexing thing licked, and now the big challenge Technorati faces is weeding out the spam blogs and so on. I continue to be more and more impressed with Technorati as time goes by.