David hinted at part 2 of his State of the Blogosphere report this weekend at Northern Voice. I'll start with his summary, then get to a few points that I've really latched onto:
- Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger's and reader's minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the “big head” of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
- Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media
- Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
- There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
- Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low – in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
- The Magic Middle is the 75,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 70 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
- Technorati Explore is a new feature that uses the authoritative topical bloggers as a distributed editorial team, highlighting the most interesting blog posts and links in over 2,500 categories.
- The new Filter By Authority slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them. This gives you the power to decide how much filtering you want.
The Technorati Hot (or Top) 100 … something that many think might be absolutely impossible to get on … but it seems that you can make it on, if you work hard, post often, write good stuff and … have some great luck.
The Magic Middle (see the chart, left). I count myself in this group of those with 70 – 1,000 inbound links (266 links for me). According to David, this is the group to watch (thank you!). The Magic Middle is where the action is. The cool stuff, the experts, the wit. How many of the magic middle will break a 1,00 links? Probably not many. But in the end, I don't think it matters. We're the folks to are still writing because we've gotten a little readership, we like to write, and have some encouragement to keep going. Okay, I also do it for my job … so maybe I'd like to break 1,000 
.
I saw the search with authority filter on Scobleizer earlier this evening. Cool feature … useful? Not sure yet. I think I'll have to try it for more than my ego feed to be sure. It does go against the “Magic Middle” idea that David is promoting. If you limit your results on a topic to those blogs with a lot of authority, aren't you going to miss a lot of the magic middle who might not have a lot of links (authority), but who might actually be the real authorities?
From talking with David at NV, and listening to his talk with Tim Bray where we got some insight into the birth of Technorati … I'm getting a good sense that Technorait is going to be some cool things … now are they going to be bought soon? I didn't get any hints of that … maybe I need to buy him a few drinks next time.
Tags: David Sifry, Technorati, State of the Blogosphere, Magic Middle
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