ON BLOGS VS. MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN GOOGLE

RACE TO THE FINISH

Kottke.org has a post up titled "Blogs vs. the New York Times in Google" (via memeorandum) highlighting a detailed evaluation of a "bet" made in 2002 between an A-list blogger and an A-list MSM (mainstream media) company.  Specifically:

"In 2002, Dave Winer of Scripting News and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times made a Long Bet about the authority of weblogs versus that of NY Times in Google:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

I decided to see how well each side is doing by checking the results for the top news stories of 2005."

After doing what looks like a methodical comparison, the core conclusions seem to be:

"So how did the NY Times fare against blogs? Not very well. For eight top news stories of 2005, blogs were listed in Google search results before the Times six times, the Times only twice. The in-spirit winner was traditional media by a 6-2 score over citizen media."

From my perspective it seems to be a good question judged by the wrong measure.  Google doesn't seem the right way to determine this kind of an answer for at least a couple of reasons.

1.  The first is pointed out by the author himself:

"Even though the nytimes.com fares very well in getting linked to by the blogosphere, it does very poorly in Google. This isn't exactly surprising given that most NY Times articles disappear behind a paywall after a week and some of their content (TimesSelect) isn't even publicly accessible at all."

This rings true especially for the last year or so given the launch of the TimesSelect initiative.  (See my posts on the subject here, here, and here). 

It's likely given the NYTimes a serious handicap in any Google type of ranking endeavor especially since most the Times' op-ed content is behind the paywall.

2.  Most blog posts tend to be discussions of topics first covered or brought up by MSM posts.  This has become especially clear after web filtering and presentation services like Memeorandum, Digg and others sprung up over the last year or so.  (see my previous posts here and here).  These services have almost become the virtual water-cooler on any given day, aggregating folks talking about the latest topics in a specific genre (tech, politics, etc.). 

These conversations obviously result in a lot of cross-linking and cross-clicking, which then would be reflected in Google's PageRank algorithms.

Rather than looking at this as a Blog vs. MSM "race" or "contest",  it may instead be more useful to think about how the on-going evolution of web technology continues to BLEND these two "sources"; and hopefully grow the CONSUMPTION and DISCUSSION of ideas around topics of the day.