How many feeders do you have? I’ll tell you who you are

The mania (or phobia?) Of statistics is also contagious blogger And small webmasters , in the hope of a providential and luxuriant growth. As many will recall, towards the beginning of the year Google added the counting of subscribers to their feeds via Google Reader . This function is added to the usual ones of sending the site map, deleting and re-including pages or entire directories in the index and other ancillary ones.

On the basis of this counting of subscribers with a slightly Google-centric character, a new trend is emerging online: that of draw up rankings of sites and blogs with the most subscriptions to their feeds . Remember that only feed subscriptions made through are listed in Webmaster Tools Google Reader, iGoogle or Orkut (see image), while readers who receive feeds with aggregation programs other than Google applications (eg RSSBandit or online aggregators such as Newsgator or Keypivot), in the list are not counted.

Nonetheless, the trend immediately takes hold : with elegance, TechCrunch immediately publishes the list of Top Blogs on Google Reader, containing a real table in Excel format, with the help of Zoho.com (which converts tables from Excel format to HTML and vice versa). But it has its own story.

Already at the end of last year the British newspaper The Guardian published an article, entitled The new 100 most useful sites, in which the changes introduced by the advent of Web 2.0 compared to two years earlier were outlined. The newspaper tried to offer, with that article, useful references to equip oneself with tools up to the standards epochal changes in action: he ranged from the names of sites to be frequented to the means to keep up to date. Above all, however, she gave that signal that today is almost taken for granted: move the application center to the web . He says the article: “Why run an application in your browser? Because for tasks shared between people in different places, it allows access to portions of work from anywhere, with the protection of a password “.

This was the Keystone which gave birth, in its entirety, to Web 2.0 and determined its high relevance, to the point of making people talk about Blogging Journalism, journalism via blog, already anticipated by some in 2005 and now accepted by force of circumstances . The speed of the network and bloggers often exceeds, even by much, that of the traditional journalist, giving news so early that the big newspapers often give space to blogging as an integral and natural part of their content space: New York can be emblematic. Times, known by the Anglo-Saxons as the Old Gray Lady who, according to the Andreottian philosophy, unable to annihilate the enemy, tries to befriend him. And it is also the reason that arises at the base of this new trend: the sites and blogs more “endowed” with subscriptions become palatable sources often highly specialized and in some cases fearsome (a new mobile phone, blamed on Engadget or Gizmodo, does not have good prospects), on which advertising income is poured out and from which, in some cases, even the large Wire Services draw.

Witty, a blogger interviewed via email about the new trend said: “The economic health of a bar is measured by kilos of coffee per day. The attractiveness of Web 2.0 is measured by the number of RSS feed readers ”.

Marco Valerio Principality