Scoble's Link Blog Delivers An Influential 1 Percent
I covered most of my near year-end statistical data on Christmas Day, when I said a lot of my visitors in 2007 were not only coming from Google, but looking for information on Google. But there are still a few pebbles left to be uncovered.
Context & Ripple Effects
Robert Scoble closes out 2007 by putting numbers on something the blogosphere had been arguing about all year: after Scripting News asked in October whether the old top-100 lists still measured anything, he reports his link blog reaches an 'influential 1 percent' of readership — small in volume, heavy in who is reading. Much of that traffic, per his own Christmas Day stats writeup, arrives from Google searches, often for information about Google itself.
The mechanics behind that are visible elsewhere in the corpus: Google has begun surfacing newly published pages in results within minutes of publication, even where they lack the backlinks normally needed to rank — a freshness bias critics say artificially promotes recent pages. For a high-frequency curator like Scoble, whose disclosure habits have made him a test case for blog transparency, that turns shared links into near-real-time search inventory.
First-order effects
- Scoble's link blog now functions as a measurable referral channel whose value sits in audience composition rather than volume — the 1 percent who click are the tech early adopters marketers and fellow bloggers most want to reach.
- Because Google indexes freshly published pages within minutes, items Scoble shares can appear in search results almost immediately, making his curation a de facto input into what searchers find on Google-related queries.
Second-order effects
- Other bloggers competing for the same early-adopter audience must optimize for Google's freshness weighting — publishing speed and aggregation cadence start to matter more than accumulated backlinks.
- Advertisers and PR operators tracking influencer reach get a template for valuing niche feeds by who reads them, pressuring traffic-based ranking schemes like the top-100 lists Scripting News questioned.
Third-order effects
- If freshness-weighted search keeps rewarding fast aggregators, influence consolidates around human curators whose picks Google surfaces — shifting leverage from original publishers toward the filter layers above them.
- Audience measurement drifts toward composition over volume: a small, well-targeted readership becomes a defensible claim to advertiser attention, eroding raw pageview counts as the currency of blog influence.
The trend: Search engines' shift toward freshness-weighted ranking is turning individual link curators into a measurable influence layer between publishers and the audiences that find them through Google.