racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

If you watch local (Philippine) television you would be bombarded with regular messages explaining some discrepancies in data gatherings for ratings in certain towns. Here’s my take on the ratings game, as posted on the Blog Herald.

[I]t dawned upon me that the reason behind all this fuss is money. For us consumers ratings could simply be indicators of how popular a television (or radio) channel or network is, for a given time of the day. However, for the network and for the media industry, ratings represent pricing power. For media that are not able to count exact “hits” or “page views” ratings are used as an indication of popularity and reach. This translates to how much the television network or station can charge advertisers, particularly as they price ad spots on cost per thousand pairs of eyeballs (or impressions, if that’s a better term).

Check out the BlogHerald editorial to see how I think this affects us, as bloggers.

I’m not really much for popularity contests, but here are my votes for Digital Filipino’s Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs (see here for details).

• The D Spot
• Annamanila

Some of my own blogs:

• Study Driving blog.
• Travelogger
• Froodee
• Photo Spot (actually an old domain, but I just relaunched this last month with totally new content)

You can still vote up to 5:00 p.m. (GMH + 0800H) today. 10 bloggers get the chance to win $100 cash in the raffle.

I’ve reopened my other blog, http://jangelo.racoma.net and this time it’s a photoblog. Do head on to the Photo Spot for a daily dose of imagery, jangelo-style.

Abe recently posted about ratified.org, the latest project that ranks Philippine blogs. Abe says ratified uses mostly Technorati rankings, but also factors in Feedburner reader count. Now I’ve been a fan of technorati because of how easily you can have your blog indexed (as opposed to Google, which may take a few days or weeks even). However, I just realized Technorati ranking may not be the best way to determine your blog’s popularity and even worth.

Here’s why.

Technorati ranks sites according to the following metrics: (1) number of inbound links from other blogs; and (2) number of blogs linking.

For instance, ratified.org ranks me at number 27, even higher than Manolo Quezon’s quezon.ph and even Connie Veneracion’s pinoycook.net, and even Bianca Gonzales’ superbianca.blogspot.com (now that got me wondering!).

So let’s say you have ten blogs linking to your site, and each of those blogs have two links to your site each (for instance, one link from the sidebar, and one specific link in one post). Your site gets 20 inbound links, and 10 linking blogs.

Technorati uses the linking blogs metric to rank blogs. So a blog with 11 blogs linking toward it will rank higher than one with 10 linking blogs.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, in terms of legitimate links and blogs. It’s a good metric after all—determining popularity and credibility based on how many people link to (and therefore like) your site.

But imagine this. What if I created a thousand flogs (fake blogs) on a free blogging service like WordPress.com or blogspot.com and what if each of those blogs had a link to my original site? And let’s add in a couple of posts from each of those blogs linking toward my original site.

I could easily get 1,000 inbound blogs and 2,000 to 3,000 inbound links from those blogs.

I’m not sure what kind of algorithm Technorati uses to determine quality. With Google, at least you know blogs have their own “link juice,” meaning a more popular, trustworthy blog linking to your site will give you better chances of ranking high in relevant searches than having a thousand newly created sites/blogs linking to you.

Okay, granted I do have more Feedburner readers than Manolo—maybe this is because I use a Feedburner redirect plugin that redirects all my RSS readers to the Feedburner feed. Or maybe I have more feed readers because my readers are more likely to come from the RSS reading crowd (the techies?). I guess it’s really not that easy to rank sites based on a few simple metrics.

Just wondering out loud.

My readers must think I’m a lazy blogger. Most of the time, you would see Twitter updates filling the front page of the J Spot. It’s because of the twitter tools plugin I’ve installed. It allows me to automatically publish tweets anywhere on the site (currently at the bottom bar, for instance), and publish daily summaries of tweets.

But the lazy blogger I am, I usually just get to update the site with real blog posts every other day or so. The rest of the time, it’s just the twitter updates. This made me think. If I keep the twitter updates, I benefit from the added keywords I post via Twitter. The updates also make for substitutes to blog posts, since I wrote them, anyway, and a collection of tweets are actually micro-blog entries.

But then again, I’m in doubt whether the tweets I post make for good substitutes to actual blog posts.

So an alternative I’m thinking of now is reviving my personal blog, the J Spotter (which has gone offline for some reason) just for the purpose of hosting my daily twitter summaries. I would then retain the current updates on the footer of this blog.

What do you think?