Reading Trends Time Again

Off the wall statistics always interest me, and the "Trends" link on Google Reader has me hooked.

Since you clearly can't get enough of all things "Michael Beck", it's time to let you in a little deeper into my head by way of what I read on the Internet.

Mashable has been the number one blog I've read over the past 30 days, as I love all things Web 2.0. But like many folks on the Internet, I attack tech blogs with the "what's in it for me" approach. With Mashable, most of the articles I read have to do with new launches that offer free services that would benefit me. They only nail me 20% of the time.

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the Nintendo Wii, and my tastes are very specific: Virtual Console games (the old school NES/SNES stuff) and anything to do with hockey games and Mario Kart. With Nintendo Wii Fanboy, Nearly 1 out of every 4 articles tickles my fancy.

Wired bombards my reader with a plethora of subjects, 84% of which I could care less about. But I do find more articles of interest with Wired than I do with BoingBoing.

Lifehacker is good for republishing articles I just read in another blog, but once in a while they link me to something I haven't read yet, or heck, they even come up with original content from time to time. They get me to read 18% of the time. With Lifehacker you don't get a full RSS feed, so if you want to continue reading an article you have to click through to the site. I click through probably 5% of the time.

Download Squad is where I pick up most of my Windows XP news, as well as tips on cool software and a nifty new start up site here and there.

I find what Robert Scoble shares in his Google Reader as interesting as Mashable or Download Squad, and so much so that it actually ranks #6 in my Google Reader trends. (Keep up the sharing, Robert, I really enjoy it!)

Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net always has interesting blogging tips to share, which I am very religious in reading (I read nearly half of the articles that come my way from Problogger) . Now if I could just be as thorough in applying the tips and techniques, perhaps I'd have a bigger subscriber base.

Clark Howard is a radio personality in Atlanta, Georgia that teaches his listeners on how to be better consumers by saving money, finding bargains, and avoiding getting ripped off. I subscribe to his feed and read his "Websites mentioned" post each day as you never know when you might find a cool new product or service before the rest of the world does. I learned about the "Virgin Webplayer" and "Virgin Connect" service through Clark Howard. (Still bummed that thing went under so fast - I really liked it!)

Digital Inspiration is a blog I've picked up on recently and discovered they have a lot of great tips for using Google services, for example. They also publish some off-the-wall humor stuff like the piece they did on the company selling pillows embroidered with DOS directories.

Last, but not least, is Rhi in Pink, a blog that follows the daily life of Rhi, a 29 year old woman living in Portland, Oregon. Her writing style is a mixture of Carrie from Sex in the City (without the Sex, if that makes sense), Kevin Nealon as "Mr. Subliminal", and a conversation you'd have with your best female friend home from college after you haven't seen her in a few years and she has absolutely fabulous stories to tell you. Am I hooked? I've read every blog post she has put out in the last 30 days: the only blog scoring 100% in my top ten.

What blogs am I reading these days?

The Blog Game: In a Dog Eat Dog Market, Winners Change the Meal

The following was originally posted as a comment to "What Would You Ask Robert Scoble?" on Mashable.

My answer to question number 5 was what I was hoping to get the most mileage out of. In short, blogs that bring "new blood" to the game, fresh readers who have limited exposure to blogs, are going to be the winners in this game. While the rest of us cannibalize traffic from each other through linkbacks and reciprocal links, the blogs that serve a niche outside of the "bloggers as readers" sphere will be the ones that climb the charts.

So for posterity's sake, if nothing else, I repost my comment here on my own personal blog.
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1. I use Mashable as a great resource for keeping up with new Web 2.0 startups. Most of the newer social networking sites I use now are ones (such as FriendFeed or Shouldi) I discovered through Mashable.

2. Blogs serve many purposes for me. In the case of news, it provides me further insight into a story, or sides of a story that traditional media outlets can't or won't. It also makes me aware of issues that are up and coming; the things that typically do not get covered by "big media" until story has reached a certain level of maturity.

But the biggest use of blogs for me is it allows me to customize the daily information download into my brain. Instead of pouring through headlines on the main page of CNN or Fox News, I'm getting custom content delivered into my reader that only deals with my interests.

3. Are bloggers journalists?
Not all bloggers are. Bloggers fall into five main categories:
Journalists
Columnists
Diarists
Conversationists
Multi-Level Marketers

Some bloggers may fall into multiple categories.

4. Are you more likely to trust a company that has a corporate blog?
Not unless that corporate blog is very candid about company issues both good and bad. Otherwise it's just another advertising avenue.

5. Flipping the question: what are blogs bad at? What’s the worst thing about blogs?

Reaching out to non-bloggers and people who don't know how to work a newsreader [is what blogs are currently bad at].
If you look at the top blogs, most of the top blogs, TechCrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Lifehacker, Mashable... 13 of the top 20 blogs are aimed at bloggers and people in the technology community.

The other 7? Celebrity gossip, Post Secret (personal gossip), Politics and a LOLcat site that's a hit with the young social networking demographic.

Too many blogs spring up [I'm no less guilty] and try to gobble up a share of the "bloggers as readers" market because they have free access to those readers simply by leaving comments that include a link to their own site. It's like being able to staple your business card to the cover story of every copy of someone else's magazine for free. Who wouldn't want to take advantage of that? [I would, and do!]

But the blogs that are getting exposure to an audience that typically didn't read blogs before are becoming the rising stars. When CNN started including the segment "what the bloggers are saying..." after all the big news stories, a whole new audience of people suddenly became curious about this new medium and [started] checking out political blogs.

When entertainment news stories started quoting TMZ.com as a source, there was a whole new group of people who became curious about blogs.

As people started posting LOLcat pictures back and forth as comments on each other's MySpace profiles, a whole different audience got exposed to a blogging website.

Going forward we're going to start seeing a trend where political blogs, humor blogs, gossip blogs and other blogs that speak to bigger demographic slices are going to start becoming the top blogs because they have bigger pools to pull readers from.

The rest of the blogs will continue to arm wrestle for the same readers while they report on everyone else's success.

Photo by Flickr user Aine D