More Fun With Numbers: Techmeme

My pal Angela Penny wrote a piece examining the sites on “Techmeme’s” leaderboard using data from Compete. She didn’t use Quantcast because for many of the sites there was no data or the numbers looked too small.

I would actually be very happy for Allen Stern if he was pulling more traffic and making more money at CenterNetworks than either GigaOm or TechMeme itself, but I’d sure be willing to bet $1000 that if I could examine the traffic logs for all three sites, CenterNetworks would place third out of three.

I simply do not trust software based tracking like Compete and Alexa – where the software is mostly downloaded by gearheads, which skews the data. On top of that, they seemingly can be easily gamed. Someday if most people are participating in Quantcast, I would trust the #’s as my own experience is that it is very accurate and sadly you can see the paltry (and diminishing)statistics for TVbytheNumbers.com – we’re still very new though and figuring lots of stuff out. But the Quantcast data is very accurate.

Not a lot of sites are “Quantified” and I do not really trust Quantcast’s panel data for smaller sites that aren’t quantified (I do tend to trust it for larger sites though). But I definitely trust it, based on my own experiences with using Quantcast tracking for sites that do use Quantcast tracking. So I trust it for GigaOm and for Calacanis.com which are quantified

Angela noted that Allen Stern’s CenterNetworks shows zero traffic in Quantcast. I suspect that is because Allen stopped using Quantcast tracking altogether, but did *not* switch his account settings on Quantcast to switch from “Quantified” to “panel based”.

For purposes of apples to apples comparisons I think something like ComScore or NetRatings is the way to go and I hope Angela succeeds in her quest for good data (she’s working on it).

Jason Calacanis: One Step Closer to Owning the New York Knicks

I’d kind of like to see it. I remember the glory days of Earl Monroe, Clyde Frazier, Dave Debusschere, Willis Reed, etc. The Dolans have run the franchise for far too long now. New blood!

I was going to go with the headline of: “Facebook to buy Mahalo for TEN BILLION DOLLARS?”, but I didn’t want to get the Dolans too excited. People will be all over Robert Scoble for this (watch the videos, they’re worth watching), especially the Web 2.0 dweebs who don’t understand that most of the world doesn’t think the same way as they do.

Scoble predicts in four years time, Techmeme, Mahalo, and Facebook are going to cause problems for Google.

Though I’m sure it won’t have any impact on Google’s stock price tomorrow and I’m not as convinced Google can’t compete well with what he’s talking about, Scoble is on to something. And hats off to Scoble, as I’d have placed him as one of those Web 2.0 dweebs.

I don’t yet buy as Scoble does that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to do something like Mahalo (and Techmeme and Facebook) itself or just buy them, but I loved where in part 3 he riffed on Yahoo for a bit as being the potential wildcard in all of this. “Watch out for Yahoo!” (about the only thing that would’ve made that any better for me is if he had said, this means YOU Kara Swisher!).

I’m still agnostic on Mahalo, but I like the premise of it a lot and want to see what happens when they have 25K human edited pages. Jason’s play here is the 80-20 rule. He doesn’t plan for Mahalo to be as all encompassing as Google, instead going for the 20% of the searches that probably represent 80% of the search market. Though why Mahalo already has pages on bacon and kielbasa and not TV Ratings is…interesting.

But c’mon, don’t you want to see Calacanis high fiving with Spike Lee during the NBA finals?

Scoble’s plan that you would only find out about the videos via social networking and not Google went south in about 10 minutes (very good natured of Scoble to post the link via twitter himself). If anything Google has gotten better and faster over the last 6 months.

Note to Scoble: More white boarding videos, less blogging. You’re a natural!