Euroblogs | 85 comments (85 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Euroblogs (none / 0)

Well, I did mention the caveats. Alexa only measures people who visit who have the alexa toolbar installed. I could probably boost ET massively over the next few weeks if I wanted to, the sample sizes are that small.

Like I say, the order of magnitude is the real indicator. The known comparator sites (kos, escolar, booman, harry's) rank in sort of expected order. So I treat them as rough groupings. This indicates how small the EU blogosphere is.

AFOE has sitemeter, I wonder who else does...

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Sat Aug 26th, 2006 at 04:02:52 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (4.00 / 2)

Sitemeter info: (I've picked "Visits this week, which is an imperfect comparator, since it assumes we're all August slumping together and that the "visit" really is calculated right.)


Site		  Visits this week
-----		  ---------------- 

DKos		       3,541,674
escolar 		 118,759
EU Referendum		  69,883
Booman			  45,002
Brussels Journal	  31,106
no-pasaran		  15,462
Eurotrib		   8,443	
AFOE			   3,999	     
No Right Turn		   3,543

Sadly neither cafebabel nor Wallström use sitemeter it seems. harry's place sitemeter link seems broken too.

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Sat Aug 26th, 2006 at 04:24:43 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (none / 0)

So we're still pretty small

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sat Aug 26th, 2006 at 04:35:06 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (none / 1)

Small, but extraordinary...

Nimble, agile, (insert cliche here)... ;-)

More seriously, escolar is clearly a lot bigger than us, but in terms of comments per day, we're quite up there.

That's a characteristic of scoop sites, of course, but it shows an engaged community.

My general feeling is that what these figures show, more than anything is smallness that is European blogging in general.

I'd love it if you or anyone could name some big beasts from other languages (like escolar) to throw into the mix to give us some more data on that.

As an addendum, I looked up a couple more "well known" UK bloggers on sitemeter:

Site Visits this week
---- ----------------

Tim Worstall 13,862
Recess Monkey ?10,000? (estimate)
Guido Fawkes ?40,000? (estimate)

Unfortunately, there's next to no info about Guido Fawkes blog that can be interpolated to a sitemeter reading. Guido is probably the largest UK political blog outside of the big media sites.

So I looked at this and guessed:

This is a potentially interesting take on UK blog reading from the Times:

http://timesnews.typepad.com/news/2006/08/britains_weblog.html

This is an interesting Lib Dem blog, apparently they are having a competition for Lib Dem blogs.

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Sat Aug 26th, 2006 at 05:28:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (none / 0)

Escolar seems to be a clearinghouse of the Spanish [mostly left] blogosphere. I have not been reading it for that long, but he basically seems to post mostly links to other Spanish blogs, with short excerpts [isn't this what Moon of Alabama does, too?] and occasional posts by Escolar himself. The centre of the universe for the spanish right-wing internet is Libertad Digital, which is not a blog but an online publication run by Federico Jimenez Losantos, the Spanish Rush Limbaugh.

I have to agree with poemless on a parallel thread that we shouldn't underestimate the power of scoop. I am beginning to believe that the reason the UK (and Spain) blogospheres is so poor in the opinion of many here (just my impression of the Spanish one, I'm sure I'll get flamed for it ;-) s the absence of a dedicated scoop site. The I-post-you-comment model of most blogs is generally a very poor debating environment. For instance, IMHO the addition of a comment section did nothing to improve Juan Cole's blog: it was a necessity brought about by the incresing volume of e-mail he was getting. "Celebrity" (e.g. Wallstrom) blogs are even worse in the quality of their comment sections.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sat Sep 2nd, 2006 at 04:58:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (none / 1)

EU Referendum's stats are somewhat inflated here. Their traffic increased about 10 times the past two months because they were investigating an alleged 'staging' of the aftermath of Qana in Lebanon and thus got a lot of attention from Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin, etcetera. When they get back to full-time discussion of the eeevil EU I think they'll settle around the level of No Parasan.

AFOE seems to be on holiday, normally they get a bit more than what they do this month. Another good blog with a bit of traffic is Europhobia (which is not Europhobic), gets about 2,000 a week on average.

On Wallström's site I found a comment by the moderator last december saying they got about 15,000 unique visitors per month. Now Sitemeter counts unique (30-minute) visits, not visitors, so I don't know how this would measure up (nor how it's developed since then).

Thanks for the stats!

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Sat Aug 26th, 2006 at 06:23:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (none / 0)

Thanks for the info and the starting of the topic off!

Unfortunately, as you say, no-one uses quite the exact same set of measurements, so it's hard to know where people who don't use sitemeter fall into the list I made. My guess is that Wallström's audience is quite big, as I imagine she gets readers from both the Eurosceptic blogs and the cafebabel set, as it were.

What's the blogging scene like in DE? Are there big beasts like escolar? Or is there a corporate slant like with the BBC and Guardian in the UK?

Finally, it seems to me that you've spent more time looking at the "eeeevil EU" sites than I have. My instinct from looking at No Pasaran and some of the others a bit is that these sites can be broken into two factions:

a) Indigenous Euroscepticism (largely British in the English blogs, naturally enough).

b) Sites dominated by an American discourse of the world. The comments are often filled with Americans and the posts often look at international issues from a US point of view, which one might say does not naturally lead to tolerance of the EU as an institution.

What do you think?

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Sat Aug 26th, 2006 at 06:58:17 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Euroblogs (none / 0)

I actually don't know much about blogging in Germany (shame on me). Most of the blogs that I know are expat blogs or German blogs in English. I do know some of the Dutch blogosphere, where there are a number of very big sites like geenstijl.nl, retecool.com or volkomenkut.com. These are all juvenile, populist and somewhat right-wing blogs, though.

Your two categories will work for most sites, though the indigenous Eurosceptics from the UK have plenty to do with the US right-wing blogosphere. I would add that some of the Eurosceptic blogs (like Tim Worstall) are part of the Libertarian International rather than a particularly American discourse.

Here in Germany there is a site called David's Medienkritik that is more or less an extension of the American right-wing blogosphere.

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Sun Aug 27th, 2006 at 07:07:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Euroblogs | 85 comments (85 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Top Diaries

The problems with formal education

Speaking right: What an Taoiseach should say in Washington

Ambushing an Taoiseach

Net Zero Energy - March 2025

We do have the cards

Manipulating Irishness

Thomas Paine's Age of Reason

Recent Diaries

Medieval Persecution of Jews Linked to Cold Snaps

Genocide On Defenseless People in Gaza

AMERICA! the Deadbeat Democracy

America Should Know Better

Crossroads, Ukraine Loses Either Way

Like a tsunami rolling ashore ...

Breaking: A Christian In the Kremlin

Going Down!

The Inside Job to Murder JFK [Update]

Ukraine Victory In Retreat

Ceasefire Negotiations Step by Step

17th of March

Ukraine Violated Human Rights in Odessa - 2014

Rutte In the Apprentice Theatre

Rearming Europe Peace Through More War

Keith Kellogg Is Out

Nordic States Join Baltics Again WWII Redux

Goodbye NATO/USA, Welcome Europe's E5

Zelensky and the Terror State Ukraine

EU Commissioner VDL In Full Panic Mode

Occasional Series