Bloggasm

I’ve wanted to start a regular Bloggasm feature for awhile now, a once-a-week post that is published like clockwork. I’ve been hesitant though because my time is limited and I didn’t want to fall off the bandwagon, because that’s just lame. But it’s New Years and the time to take on bold new initiatives, so I’m announcing what I hope will be a regular feature.

I got the idea from reading TVNewser, the TV News industry blog. Several times a week they post a “ticker” that tracks the viewership ratings for all the major cable news networks. TV ratings have always been a hotly debated issue, and I thought why not do that with blogs? I’ve written a couple posts on Bloggasm tracking blog traffic for major sites and they’ve always been widely circulated. And some of the biggest stories to hit the web during the election season were the ones comparing the traffic data for the biggest political sites.

So I’ve chosen 10 major conservative blogs and 10 major liberal blogs to track on a weekly basis. Rather than relying on tracking sites like Comscore, I chose only blogs that openly display their statistics through Sitemeter.

Now, I should first issue the caveat that tracking blog traffic is far from an exact science. It’s much more accurate at tracking long term trends rather than giving realistic traffic numbers. I chose only blogs that use Sitemeter so that my results can be as consistent as possible. Rather than trying to track unique visits, I’m going to deal with raw pageviews, which simply count the number of times a page is loaded, not the number of individuals who loaded it.

I’m not sure which day this will be posted every week. I’m thinking it has to be a Monday, Wednesday or Friday. I think it will come down to whichever day would be the least stressful

I’m starting with political blogs for now, but I’d love to open it up to several different niches. Hopefully this beta test will be successful, because I think this will actually be a very valuable feature. Wish me luck.