What Is The Definition Of A Blog?
Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad - 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's official publishing channel has scaled sharply from the prior year's cadence: its 294th post represented nearly 100 times its 2005 posting frequency, following the previous annual Google-blogging review. Google reports 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views for the year, while Technorati places it 16th overall and first among official company blogs.
The story's broad syndicated pickup framed those figures as a debate over whether a company-controlled publication should count as a blog. The more durable point is that Google's owned channel has become a large distribution outlet, not merely a corporate bulletin.
First-order effects
- Google gains a measurable, high-reach channel for publishing company messages directly, with volume and audience large enough to place its official site near the top of Technorati's rankings.
- Technorati's ranking makes Google the benchmark official company blog, giving other corporate publishers a visible audience-and-scale comparison.
Second-order effects
- Companies seeking comparable reach face pressure to treat publishing cadence and audience measurement as communications infrastructure rather than occasional public-relations output.
- Technorati benefits from a prominent corporate example that broadens the competitive set its blog rankings are used to evaluate.
Third-order effects
- If company-run sites continue to achieve rankings and audiences associated with independent blogs, the distinction between corporate communications and the blogosphere will increasingly rest on editorial control rather than distribution scale.
The trend: Corporate publishing is becoming a direct-audience channel whose reach can rival prominent independent blogs, challenging older definitions of what a blog is.