Over the last year or so I’ve noticed an increasing number of folks making their case for a site’s rise to ascension or certain doom by looking at Alexa stats, the most recent of which is Phil Sim who declares tech blogging as a whole is on the downslide:

The tech blogosphere has peaked. Definitively. It’s reached it’s nadir and I’m afraid it’s nothing but downhill from here, baby.

Phil’s prominent visual evidence? Alexa stats for tech.memeorandum and tailrank. As Janice from Friends would say: Oh. My. God.

C’mon Phil, have you ever run any Alexa traffic tests on any of your own sites? It is painstakingly easy for any website with 50-100 visitors a day to go from millions to a sub 100,000 Alexa rating by simply installing their toolbar and visiting their site once or twice a day (not artificially, just through the normal course of browsing). Think I’m full of it? Just install the toolbar and come back to this post in a month with your results. You’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Why they don’t filter the same IP address visiting the same site is beyond me. And what about somebody using a proxy with their toolbar?

So imagine if some site has a script to just sit and refresh to their site using a proxy at random intervals with Alexa toolbar running? I don’t trust Alexa stats for anything other than a really, really generic third party guess. It’s way too biased a stats service to be representative of any serious study in my book.

Am I just saying this because I’m somehow bitter about this website’s Alexa rating? No, this site in fact has trended well according Alexa, just take a look at the last two years:

I don’t spend my time obsessing over stats, there’s too much other work to do. Those bloggers who do risk losing sight of what readers actually care about. Spend the excessive stats crunching time looking for interesting new products, services and ideas to review or build something cool of your own and share.

Not saying one should never look at stats, of course not, that’s part of being a webmaster. Just don’t obsess over Alexa numbers.

The blog and news mashup sites
Now let’s look at what sites Phil is analyzing as being representative of all/most tech bloggers: tech.memeorandum and Tailrank. This is where the post just became bizarre. These are only two services looking at a rather small cross section of blogs. They filtered their source list from over 100 million blogs into the thousands, losing the voice of the interesting tech blogger who just started blogging last week unless linked by somebody like Scoble or the others listed there (disclaimer: Hmm is listed there), and that’s supposed to be representative of tech bloggers as a whole?

No way.

It might give one small snapshot or a fleeting peek inside a window of what a certain group of people are interested in at the moment but it fails to capture every or dare I say even most interesting things going on out there. It may hit a few of them, but it’s not 100% comprehensive. I doubt even the creator, Gabe Rivera, would agree that it is that solid (yet). It’s a supplement to your reading list like any other source is and a good one.

And Tailrank, Megite, Blogniscent are all also rans, sorry. Perhaps a few new and different features than Tech.Memorandum (TM) but mostly lemmings from what I’ve seen. There’s no reason to read them if you already read TM, is there? I mean if the premise is that they all are trying to provide readers with the most talked about of the minute, then if they are doing their best job, then they would all be the same, right? Why would we, as readers, need to read the same aggregated content from multiple places just formatted in a different design? This isn’t saying anything about these TM clone creators although one of those three — and I won’t mention names — made his service known by spamming the comment section of blogs (including this one). What does that say?

As for TM? Last time I checked it is a (mostly) automated filter of a special list of bloggers so if the sources that write there link in an orgy to mostly the same sites — and many of them do — at the same times, of course it’s going to result in the appearance of nothing new to say and few new voices breaking through. Still, in defense of TM, that’s not always the case.

And BTW, as written a couple days ago, I’m glad to see Gabe venture into the baseball niche. His baseball season starting timing is smart. Perhaps Phil should have pointed out that a current dip in traffic might indicate that some techies are venturing outside and getting some fresh air and enjoying the crack of the bat and the smell of freshly mown grass and a new baseball season.

Traffic ebbs and flows based on lots of different things, including real world events, and the summer slowdown which is looming in the distance is well known to any webmaster who has been at this awhile. We just passed spring vacation too, which means some tech bloggers might have been spending more time with their family rather than scouring their RSS reader for the latest happenings.

The breakdown with aggregators
BTW, I don’t think tech.memeorandum should have no competition, but let’s be realistic here: how many tech bloggers want or need or actually can follow more than one tech news aggregator? I follow digg more closely than Slashdot simply because there’s no time to cover both extensively. I like boing boing and engadget, but I don’t like sucking on their firehoses. If I tried to cover TM and its numerous clones, I’d miss reading some individual blogs simply from the nature of trying to keep up with the constantly evolving nature of these sites. I don’t even visit TM every day any more, which in my opinion is the least disruptive of the ones I’ve seen, for this very reason. I’ve gone back to reading my RSS list more (with the help of reblog) than following the aggregators. It’s too easy to get sucked into the echo chamber of the same group of bloggers if any one aggregator source — and that includes TM — is used too extensively for too long a period of time. This is no grand revelation, other bloggers have noticed this too.

Running out of things to say?
Another point Phil makes is he thinks tech bloggers are running out of things to write about and just rehashing their best stuff.

There is some truth to the notion that many bloggers have nothing new to say and rehash their best posts from months ago. I could make an argument that Phil Sim’s own blog jumped the shark when he admitted going on a blog hiatus (that’s when I unsubscribed). The only reason I came across his post this morning? Tech.Memeorandum. Oh, the irony!

And check out this post here where he writes:

Ever get the feeling that the really, truly smartest people on the planet aren’t ever likely to blog because a) they don’t need to prove how smart they are b) they don’t have time c) they’re actually doing, not writing.

And then his post today a mere 30 days or so later:

Late last year/earlier this year, there was a pretty significant influx of new bloggers into the game and personally I think we’ll look back and say that was the tech blogosphere’s golden age.

About that time, anybody in tech who was ever likely to start a blog did.

Make up your freaking mind, Phil. Is everybody smart in tech already blogging or not? If we’ve passed the “golden age” then you think they already have come and gone or that they will never start blogging at all?

I think the answer is there are still tons and tons of smart tech people out there just itching to start a blog (maybe they don’t know they are, but they will be someday) and I hope I am among their early subscribers. It’s all too easy to say: the good ones have already come and gone. I’m just not that pessimistic. Cynical about the industry and certain technologies, yes, but pessimistic that all the good technology writers have come and gone?

No way.

And being a cliche of onself is a problem with all topics, not only tech. How does one get out of it? Easy, find new and different sources (or voices within sources). That doesn’t mean abandon old ones, but if everybody is linking to the same thing and you don’t have a new and/or different take, dig for something else.

Bottom line: I think Mr. Sim is projecting here. He can’t decide if he wants to be blogging or not and/or if he is happy with the current state of tech or not and is rolling out Alexa stats and some poorly thought out, self-conflicting rant to legitimize his flawed opinion.

There’s nothing wrong with tech blogging and there is no golden age that has come and gone. Want to be in the grandstands? No problem, that’s less work and it’s fun to watch. Want to join the scene? Just fire up your post editor and let’s play ball.

Update 10:47pm PST: Phil responded including numerous other points complete with the rather tired ‘who am I’ rhetoric and bashing on my name (it’s called branding). He also pointed out I mistakenly pluralized his name as Sims instead of Sim. Sorry about that Phil, that has now been corrected in all instances above and I will not make that mistake again. I’ll have to sleep on the other points and see whether I want to address them tomorrow or not. Phil’s post left me a couple places to pursue in greater detail if/when I have the energy and time. I enjoy a healthy debate, Phil

Alexa stats debunked elsewhere
Dare Obasanjo refutes Alexa stats for Live.com: “I don’t think one can draw any conclusions on the ‘adoption’ or popularity of Windows Live based on this data.”

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