The StatBot

Scoble, the guy who originally made the concept of Google Reader Shared Items as a “Link Blog” famous. He was also the first person to be featured on Statbot (back when it was hosted on my personal blog), and has been extremely helpful to me in ways even he might not have imagined

Anyway, here is the leaderboard of his last 5,000 shares on Google Reader:

Notes

• Only four individual blogs up there (LG, Thomas Hawk, Dave Winer and Scoble himself). Much lower than the one for Louis Gray, but expected for Scoble.
• I could count four firehose feeds there (Planet Interwingly, ZDNet Blogs, MSDN Blogs & Hacker News) which pretty much tons of blogs/feeds packed into one. How the hell does he read them? Borg technology?
• That weird looking url at spot 6, as most of you would have guessed, is his Ego Search feed on Google Blogsearch. I wonder how long back he had switched from Technorati to Google Blog Search?
• And that other weird looking url at spot 14 is the combined feed of all the GigaOM network blogs. Wonder why it isn’t provided by GigaOM itself?
• Both Giz and Engadget are present, Engadget has almost twice as many shares as Gizmodo.
• Hacker News beats Digg (which is at spot 36, with 25 shares).
• The top four are all in some way or the other related to Web 2.0 and startups – and combined together contribute to more than 13.5 % of his feed.

And to compare trends, here’s the leaderboard for the last 10,000 shares on Google Reader:

Notes

• First thing to note is that the Ego Search has jumped up in the bigger list, meaning that either (i) People stopped writing much about Scoble or (ii) He stopped caring.
• There is still a gap between Engadget and Gizmodo, though not as pronounced. Must get real hard, looking at all that tech porn
• All those firehose feeds were still there, and there were more shares from them than now. Infact, two firehoses are present in the 10,000 shares list but missing in the 5,000 shares list - Digg and Sun Blogs.
• Note that Digg beats Hacker News here. Reddit is way down at spot 72 with 26 shares (out of 10,000)
• Quite a few shares from when he was still at the now-defunct PodTech.

Questions for Scoble:

Now, I have a few questions to ask Scoble:

• Why the hell is FastCompany missing from both the lists? I found a total of just 9 shares from all the fastcompany.com websites combined. WTF? (Or am I totally missing something here?)
• Why Google Blog Search instead of Technorati?
• Why the firehose feeds instead of subscribing individually? (I once tried subscribing to the MSDN Blogs firehose feed. Lasted all of 2 hours before unsubscribing)
• If the link blog is pinned as a place to share quality links/posts, and it’s so dominated by magazi-blogs, does that mean that Indie bloggers are not producing great content? Or content in great-enough numbers? (Note that this is not as bad for the Indie guys as it sounds – I’ll post graphs tomorrow showing that many blogs contribute a small number of posts, while a few blogs contribute a large number of posts. That’s power law – All I’m asking is why is that so. Why aren’t the few blogs that contribute a large number of posts written by single persons, but are basically magazines?)
• Am I sane?

Get the Raw Data from Zoho

And if you want to have a look yourself, you can get the entire list (not just the top 25) from this Zoho Spreadsheet (html version). I will probably upload spreadsheets for every leaderboard I do from now on