A couple of days ago we hinted that folk should be careful of the interpretation offered by David Sifry of Technorati’s stats on the size of the blogosphere. Today we ask you to take the statistics themselves with a pinch of salt.
Technorati’s statistics system is unstable as the image below shows – and that discrepancies of about 20% can be found in Technorati’s stats reporting. We monitored the ‘ranking‘ of PSFK.com over the last few days – where Technorati monitors the number of links by the number of blogs pointing at a site – and saw how wildly it fluctuates.
Last Friday there were 2,571 links from 706 blogs to PSFK.com but when we checked this morning, Technorati reported we only had 1,867 links from 593 blogs. Where had the 700 links gone we wondered? We didn’t have to wait long because by mid-morning they had returned – we had 2730 links from 736 blogs.
Phew – back to normal we thought. But no – at 4.54pm those links fell again, only to return later that evening.
Technorati has been operating for 5 years but it still doesn’t work properly at a fundamental level. If the statistics that the system provides the users varies so dramatically – what can be said of the validity of the statistics that David Sifry reported on?
Why don’t you try this at home too?
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The numbers are way overinflated. And the disparities during the day that you reported are even more troubling. The blogosphere may be growing, but at a much smaller factor than outlined by Tecnorati. I myself have created over 30 blogs this year alone. I post to maybe 3-4. Thanks for the posting. Your site is a great resource. And btw, do you ever sleep? :)
August 9th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Strange, and definitely points to some bug. I’ve asked our engineers to look into it immediately.
Sorry about that!
Dave
August 9th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
Interesting timing as I had a similar question recently. Am waiting for a reply.
How is it possible 740 people link to my blog but in the RANK area (see grab below) only 629 blogs are shown to link? (grab: http://i5.tinypic.com/24653qe.gif)
Namaste
Al
August 10th, 2006 at 6:22 am
Al,
The reason for the discrepancy is that the ranking is based on the number of blogs and links that have come to your blog in the last 6 months – so those numbers will be different than the number of posts that have a link to you, which is what the second number is…
We’re working on some fixes for the site that will make this difference (and explanation) more obvious. Thanks for the comment!
Dave
August 10th, 2006 at 4:17 pm