Earlier today, Bearing Drift claimed to be "Number 1 - at least that’s what Technorati says" in the Virginia political blogosphere. First, a note on Technorati. In short, it's worthless for measuring traffic. What it does, instead, is "rates each blog's 'authority', the number of unique blogs linking to the blog over the previous six months." This is hard to take seriously, as it can easily be gamed, favors blogs that have a lot of incoming links for whatever reason, and generally leads to wacky results (e.g., as Miles points out, The Green Miles blog "ranking" higher than the much larger Blue Virginia). Also, in no way does Technorati measure actual traffic - "hits," "visits," "page views," "unique visitors," etc. - to a blog. It doesn't even try to do that. Which is exactly why it's important for blogs to use Sitemeter or Google Analytics, both of which are reliable tools to measure incoming traffic. Most major progressive blogs display their Sitemeters publicly, which is what we did at Raising Kaine/RK and also here at Blue Virginia.
In the Virginia political blogosphere, many blogs don't display their blog traffic publicly (why, I've never understood), but several major blogs do so. See the graph above for the January 2010 "visits per day" statistics for the blogs where I could get my hands on such data. The results are clear: NLS is #1, followed by Blue Virginia (about 57% of NLS' traffic in January 2010), followed by Bearing Drift (36% of NLS) and BVBL (31% of NLS), followed by Anti-BVBL (20% of NLS), followed by Blue Commonwealth (19% of NLS) and The Green Miles (5% of NLS). Bacon's Rebellion used to display a Sitemeter, but no longer does so. Back in April 2007, Bacon's Rebellion received around 380 visits per day, 17% of NLS at and 21% of RK at the time. I'm not sure about traffic at Waldo Jaquith, Vivian Paige, or VB Dems, as none of them display traffic statistics publicly.
Anyway, these are the real statistics for the Virginia political blogosphere, courtesy of Sitemeter. Now, back to discussing and debating policy matters.
P.S. It's worth noting that Alexa is the same basic b.s. as Technorati. Just ignore it. As far as Google Analytics is concerned, it's basically identical to Sitemeter from what I've seen of it. Both are excellent.
