The point of the linkology article (although it is really more a list with a paragrah intro) appears to be that breaking into the A-List, to be one of the top read blogs, is tough.  Perhaps even tougher than breaking your news into traditional media.  A public relations professional pitches stories in old world media to writers and editors.  News media are looking for something NEW and actually have a NEED for the PR Professional. 

On the flip side, blogging is basically a conversation and we tend to go back to the same watering hole on a regular basis for our conversations.

But back to the graphic.  I don’t think it is fair that the image shows only links between those blogs.  Why not show it more like a network diagram?  In fact, based on the visual it looks like a the good old boy’s club, yet I know that boing boing links out to other random (wonderful?) sites almost hourly.

Hopefully the challenge for bloggers is like the challenge for PR professionals; be interesting and be honest and hopefully the story will develop legs.  If that doesn’t work host a huge party and just throw money at the problem.

And oh ya, I found the linkology map through this Doc Searls blog post.  And he is one of top 100.  I am not.  So I am telling nobody about the popularity of others to perpetuate the blog club.  Go figure. <g>

For this particular post there are numerous types of arguments to be made, and one common tactic is to debate two opposing points as if they were opposing elements, and therefore side step other issues that relate.  I am not suggesting this was done in a malicious way in the RSS to Blog Readership debate, I am just emphasizing the point that RSS and Blogs are not even close to a 50% correlation although I don’t actually have that number.  RSS started with news as I understand it, was adopted by Blogs thank heaven (I would be LOST without www.bloglines.com for example).  So to correlate blogs to rss you would have to somehow source all news or other informational sources and exclude them to get the true correlation of RSS to blog readership.

The graph below is an example of the growth of RSS as we see it in our client base.  This is one snapshot, from one client, with all names removed.  And I definitely picked one that I knew was growing rapidly in RSS utilization.  So statistically this is completely biased, but relevant.  The RSS graph below is showing not site traffic, or hits or visits, but JUST RSS pulls as measured by our software Tendenci that powers other web sites.

It is important to note that while Tendenci has a ton of functionality, one thing it does NOT have yet is a blog module (11-2005).  So the RSS pulls to the rights are on news, articles, jobs, calendar events, basically anything BUT blogs for mostly organizations.  And note over 32k rss pulls last month in this particular site graph.

What also intrigues me is what got in the water four or five months ago that caused RSS to hit a tipping point.  The functionality has been in our software for over a year and a half, but one day it just took off requiring us to rush for additional server purchases!

And for one final wild card, I am just full of questions and few answers today, sorry, but the final wild card is that several months ago Google and Yahoo (Slurp) bots became very-very-interested in the RSS feeds on our client sites.  I know this because we also have an search engine optimization division that monitors these trends.  So to get accurate usage of rss you would also have to conduct surveys that excluded automated traffic from RSS data.

Yes I realize that large companies like IBM and Microsoft have active and thriving intranets, but they are accessible from the Internet and quite frankly I hear things like "on the HR web site" as opposed to the actual word "intranet".  It’s like Intranets still exist but the word isn’t cool anymore. 

Just for grins I did a search on "intranets and blogs" and got a public wiki (open) about Intranets (closed) as the top result.  Hmmm.