A long established strand of media studies is to argue and lament the global dominance of the Western/Northern/American media business over the South/Developing World. Now a rambling thought experiment: Aggregation tools such as Technorati (check their new blog finder) calculate a blog’s or site’s importance more or less according to how many incoming links they have. More links and buzz, more visibility. If we stick to the English-writing world, so far Americans have been the most active bloggers. And Americans dominate the “charts”. But what if, say, Indians really embrace blogging (OK, they don’t seem to be quite there yet). And assume they would write and discuss mostly Indian issues, and link to other Indian blogs. Wouldn’t they then start racing up the charts, become more visible, and …dominate?
I also assume here that Technorati & co are objective – i.e don’t have any geographical bias. Is it so? I haven’t been able to find out.
Argh! I couldn’t post my comment due to “questionable content”, and when I signed in to TypeKey, it said this site hasn’t signed up for that.
I’ll email my comment to you instead and perhaps you can post it later.
Sorry, Jill. You were stopped by MT-Blacklist, the comment-spam superhero, which failed this time. Anyway, here is your comment:
“I don’t know exactly how Technorati work out their rankings, but I was interested to learn that Google’s PageRank system and really, any crawl of sites (as far as I understood) can be affected by where you START the crawl. At her keynote at Hypertext last week, Monica Henzinger, research director of Google Europe, explained that because in a particular project they’d happened to start a crawl at a German language site, the stats of what language websites are in showed far more German language websites.
On the other hand, she also said that upon learning that Turkey only had 59000 websites registered in Google (if I remember correctly), she thought that Turkish websites were underrepresented. She and a Turkish researcher had got a complete list of all domains registered in Turkey (through some connections somehow, the registrars I suppose) and done a complete crawl of them all, and had found pretty much the exact same number of websites. So in that case, Google’s automated estimate was pretty much equivalent to the “real” figure returned by looking at a manually collected list of domains.
I’d love to hear the answer if you, say, were to interview Monika Henzinger and ask her whether Indian results could dominate… Perhaps that’s why they now have Googles for every country? Perhaps Technorati DOES have a US bias, due to presumably starting their count from US sites, and they should really consider having country specific subsites?
Global is complicated.”
indians will not only dominate blogging but india will be a major force as far as internet is concerned with more than 30,000 comp. engg. rolling out of indian colleges……..technorati & co r not bias…
What if Indian blogs ruled?
If we stick to the English-writing world, so far Americans have been the most active bloggers. And Americans dominate the “charts”. But what if, say, Indians really embrace blogging (OK, they don’t seem to be quite there yet). And as…