Actually I am pleasantly surprised, I never considered I will be anywhere up in the charts, and Pat I was lost in thought and forgot to mentioned that I don’t get very much more traffic monthly than you. About average 10-20K more monthly.

I am almost as popular as Xiaxue! Hurrayyy! But seriously, as we discussed, I am a true believer of quality rather than quantity. If you write a gossip blog that you get 10K hits a day, you probably rank nowhere compared to the kings like those in Gawker media. But if you write a nich blog, get 1K hits a day, AND corner the market say via google ranking, you win.

Thanks for the props Pat!

I’ve been wined and dined when I was a journalist, and lots of the fawning died down the moment you switch to a smaller pub. Only to have the unctuous charm turned on again when I ended up doing PR agency shopping with my boss when I was in-house at a MNC.

What I value are peers (PR and journalists) who have treated me with professional respect and courtesy. I’m indebted to my ex-bosses (both PR and journalism) who have taught me stuff. And perhaps most importantly, that I serve up something useful to the audience that I write for.

If you’re good at what you do, you will gain respected in the field you’re in, something to me that is more meaningful. Fame is a secondary by-product. My 2 cents.

Naw, I drive my traffic to my site by means of SEO and selective plugs via portals, not individual blogs. The intention here was purely educational really. If I want to elicit popularity, I’ll plug a live web cam of my wife and I making out, no? I don’t mind the preconceived judgment you have about me – we bloggers tend to do that consciously and subconsciously. Else, I don’t see how we form a personal opinion.

On the contrary, based on RSS feeds alone, you’re tops on the URLFAN and I won’t discount that. Time to go track you on Twitter. And everything else.

Popularity ain’t nothing unless you’re talking about increasing personal brand awareness. I suppose, without my blog, I won’t be seeing actual published works in decent non-trashy magazines. That aside, I don’t quite understand the hype over being a microcelebrity of any sort. For fucks sakes, at the end of the day, we’re all humans.

I second your thoughts on this. Ironic in a way, isn’t it? For blogs to grow, we find ourselves wondering if we need to return to our traditional roots – where all publications are audited and having lower circulation does not necessarily be a bad thing if the nature of the magazine is niche and has a targeted audience.

Someone should write an online brand auditing script for this. Yes, big hint, Mr SweetCron.

Actually no, I’m a far cry form most of you guys. Which is ok, that isn’t quite as important to me as having our little Social Media realm grow steadily with quality beyond quantity.

I’m seeing different generations of bloggers in Singapore, so some of us would naturally have more traction than others (even if they’re less interesting like myself!). While we do see the rare overnight sensations, whether a blogger sustains his readers’ interests for long is something that is evenly distributed across the blogging populace. For instance, as you’ll see from my chart, I’m slowly bowing out since I’ve been blogging less intensely due to work pressure (I find twitter-addiction taking over).

As Yongfook alluded to with what i believe is his stab at the long tail effect, popularity is ultimately relative. There’s also network density, where even someone with a small network may have strong links, versus having a big network with weak links. Someone like Claudia has a lot of network centrality due to her interest and social role. Popularity numbers are merely a convenient indicator, though they are most useful if tracked over time. By seeing the trends, we can discover the differences that make the difference.

FYI: If you find yourself being asked if you’re Pat Law quite frequently in public, then congratulations: You’re a microcelebrity! See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-12/st_thompson

you touched on it with your point about traffic or keyword-mentions not necessarily relating to popularity. you can go further and say that popularity doesn’t necessarily translate to influence. or influence not translating to revenue.

you could have a high traffic blog in a cheap keyword market and make less revenue than the next fellow with his average-traffic, expensive keyword niche blog with the latter doing better ad sales. or you could be some novelty blogspot blogger posting up dirty stories every day with massive blogosphere buzz but no marketing sense to monetise it.

popularity extrapolated from traffic and mentions is fun to look at, but it’s difficult to translate well into a meaningful business context. it’s the kind of metric that online advertisers who still think “brand awareness” is an important metric will love, because it gives them a way of measuring the success of their broken, broadcast media-style ads that don’t actually sell anything directly.

OOOH SNAP.

Anyway you probably know all this, I just wanted to try to sound clever.