MsKitka.com

I came across an interesting tool at Steve Garfield’s Video Blog the other day that rates your blog. Garfield had used the tool to see how much his Video Blog was worth and it was quite a nice shiny penny. Intrigued to see how my blogs/vlogs would rate, I gave it a try.

Apparently, while mskitka.com is worth over $20,000, kitkast.com is worth absolutely nothing. So, although Kitkast has almost 3000 subscribed viewers each day, the site is viewed as worthless by Technorati.

Funny… especially if you look at this graph (pictured above) that shows the feedburner RSS feed statistics. On that list, Kitkast should be worth much more than $0. Unfortunately, even this graph is incomplete… Rocketboom is nowhere to be listed on the list of vlogs, so I have absolutely no idea how Kitkast might rate by comparison. All I’m sure of is that Rocketboom would blast off the map as well, probably surpassing Kitkast’s lead on vlog subscribers.

So, why is Technorati’s assessment so different from vlogmap.org? Links.

Technorati doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how many people have subscribed to your feeds or how many people have visited your site. The only thing Technorati is concerned with is how many people have linked to your blog. What an outdated ranking system. Well, since kitkast.com is only a couple of weeks old and hasn’t really been publicized as being a separate domain from mskitka.com, no one has linked to it yet. Therefore, Technorati says it is worthless.

So, how should we judge blogs and vlogs in the future? I’m no techie (I’m a Trekkie), but I do know that these are a couple of factors that should be taken under consideration for rating a site as a whole:

• Number of daily subscribers
• Number of daily unique visits

No links, you ask? No. The reason being that often the only reason a link is on a site is because it is a courtesy for being listed on a directory. This opens too many possibilities. A person could start a whole bunch of fake blogs just to link to one blog or a person can make it a standard in the blog software so that every time someone starts a new blog there are certain blogs listed on his/her page. The whole thing is just messy… why should we rate blogs/vlogs by their number of incoming links?

When I first started mskitka.com I found the whole link issue stressful. Since I knew that Technorati and BlogShares would rate my site using the link method I was a little stingy to provide links at first. When I first started my blog, I made a link to CodeRonin and SugarBank only because they were the two most important blogs to me. However, after being nudged by friends and directories, I realized that I had to start providing more links. This is why I made a links page instead of a links section in the sidebar (like most bloggers).

However, when it comes to Technorati and BlogShares, it seems there’s no way to escape their established system. Won’t someone out there programme a better standard for judging sites?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Videoblogging, Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.