Kos: The Most Highly Trafficked?
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James Joyner | Thursday, February 3, 2005 |
Michael Demmons makes an important point about the recent assertion the DailyKos is the most trafficked political weblog:
DailyKos is not really a blog anymore. Itâs a community. If you look at Kosâs site, one thing is clear. It consists of many, many blogs called Diaries. Several people write there. Youâll also notice that every one of the Diaries in DailyKosâs community has the same SiteMeter button on it - even though they arenât written by Markos Moulitsas.
A fair point. Many blogs, now including OTB, have more than one author posting content. On most group blogs, though, that content is presented as a single site with each new post appearing on the main page. That’s not the case with DKos’ diaries, which are essentially separate blogs with comparatively few page views.
At what point does such a site stop being a (single) blog? I don’t know.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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The point is a fair one. While it would be one thing for Kos's site to feature a number of writers on one page, the prevalence of these disparate diaries that have their own readerships seems to place it more along the lines of a slashdot-style community.
The main problem is the sitemeter statistics. If all of these blogs are being counted as part of the traffic, then clearly it's skewing the results.
In all fairness, it is still a blog. Whether it has one author or many.As an Example, look at the Outpost.
Where it becomes misleading is to say that traffic is for just one writer or just one person.
It is also misleading when the diary entries begin with,,,"Dear Diary, I always thought those crazy letters were made up. Until it happened to me. Her name was Lola and she..."
RWD: The question comes because the Diary content is, essentially, offsite. That is, they don't appear on the main page along with Kos and his other main contributors. The most recent few entries are hyperlinked on the front of the page, though.
Dkos is a huge blog and would almost certainly rank in the top 2 or 3 even aside from the diaries. The question is really only about whether the "twice InstaPundit" traffic rating is right.
It doesn't seem to me to be a blog. A weblog is a log of entries listed together, whether by one or many authors. Kos isn't that. It's a collection of blogs. Each one is a log of entries collected onto one page.
If Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan opened up comments on their sites and tracked them, the numbers would scroll faster than sitemeter could keep up with. Speaking of which, Sitemeter's tallies, in my experience, are a fraction of what the site actually gets via visits. My webalizer totals are vastly higher than sitemeter's.
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