The Stranger’s Slog is still the best blog in the city. It’s a must-read if you want to keep up on the daily (hourly!) drama in everything from the local music scene to Oly politics.
Still, the Slog has a big fat hole in it. The Sloggers have ignored the usual foundation of blog leaders — smaller blogs.
Here’s a look at the percentage of traffic referred to Capitol Hill Seattle from other blogs since we were born back in January. This doesn’t include traffic from search engines like google and yahoo that send the bulk of our traffic. We got a lot of love from Metroblogging Seattle when they featured an article about our move to the Hill so it’s a bit of an anomaly. But note just how paltry the output from the Slog is. It’s the anemic blue slice at the top of the pie.
Believe it or not, our point isn’t that The Stranger needs to point to our blog more. We just happen to have pretty good data that illustrates the problem — The Slog doesn’t link to local blogs. Instead, most of its links point to newspapers and tv sites around the world. Or the random porno myspace page.
For the most part, this kind of linking makes good sense. Just ask Matt Drudge. He’s been making a biz of it for years. The risk for The Slog, however, is watering down the local audience it can offer to advertisers. With every link to the NY Times, Sloggers may attract a wider and wider readership but they risk damaging their ability to provide a solid Seattle audience.
Maybe there is nothing worth linking to. Maybe Sloggers have their hearts set on developing a wider following. Maybe a Seattle-specific audience isn’t worth shit compared to being able to hawk cigarettes to urban kiddies from coast to coast. Or maybe Savage and crew just haven’t thought about it. Since they don’t seem to be reading, can somebody send them a link to this post? Maybe they’ll link to us.
–j
While the Stranger’s weblog might not link to local weblogs very, this is not really what your data demonstrates. The pie chart only shows that the Stranger doesn’t refer readers to Capitol Hill Seattle. This conclusion only really makes sense if CHS is representative of all local weblogs.
I’m curious if the links from thestranger.com are from a particular post, or from links followed from their comments section. Similarly, are the majority of the metroblogging links from our interview or from the blogroll?
Yup — assumption is that we are representative of the little blogs.
The stranger traffic we have seen is only from comments — most from us, 1 I think from a reader.
A big chunk (but less than 1/2) of metroblog links came from the interview but the rest are a steady trickle from your blogroll, the occasional comment and any post love we may have gotten.
What has metroblogging seen? Is Slog part of your traffic family tree or a dead end?
(btw, we also meant to more emphatically note that we understand entirely if the slog and others just don’t find much to link to on our blog — we haven’t been posting a lot for one. Possible we’re representative of other local blogs in this regard, too. but it doesn’t seem to be the case. We find plenty of interesting material on local blogs that the stranger doesn’t note. A granular but good example was recent posting about the new Cupcake Royale in West Seattle. The Slog blathered on about it as if they were the only voice around that was noting the occurence. Meanwhile, they could have still had their say and made sure to give some love to http://westseattleblog.com/ who was posting about the cakes and much more. There is something to harness here for one of you ‘big’ guys — be the leading voice, go ahead and post on things far and near but also be a conduit and supporter to the other voices in Seattle and you’ll be bigger still. In the meantime, the hole in the Slog remains.)
I agree that the Slog has been particularly bad at this, but Seattlest hasn’t been that great either. Our blogroll is hopelessly thin and outdated and actually doesn’t even include this site.
And thanks for pointing stuff like this out from time to time. If Capital Hill Seattle nevr talked about community it would almost never be brought up.
I’ve never thought of the Stranger/Slog as representing any more than a very vital, but relatively narrow segment of the Seattle metro community.
I read it, but it never occurred to me they would overlook anything including the words “Capitol Hill.” Conversely, I never imagined they would consider anything mentioning the word “Belltown” relevant.
If I saw them in the Bent’s referral list, I would assume it was a mistake. Maybe I should aim higher.