Scientificblogging.com is another blogging community. They have a different model. Almost all of it is commentary on the freshest papers. This is fine, but is unlikely to draw much of an audience. Popular magazines, like Wired, are trying to do the same.
but only because he used a prism that was not very accurate.
Using only Techorati 'authority', which measures incoming links from other bloggers, his column alone would seem to be 20X the popularity of our entire site. It's a unique metric, just like Alexa, and some people will swear by it (especially if makes them look number one) but obviously we do not write for, nor are we linked by, other bloggers. We certainly don't have 70 linking to each other, like Scienceblogs.com gets using Typepad as their engine, plus links from blogging friends elsewhere. Our audience reads, maybe comments here and there, and moves on. I would assume that the bulk of the blogosphere has heard of us but aren't readers.
The science audience certainly reads us. We're at 1.88 million pageviews as of last night. Thats's not a small number.
Back to the issue, the critic knew he was taking an unpopular position. I don't think he did it for attention, I think he (she?) did it out of concern but didn't do a lot of research into the science blogging marketplace. It's fair, I have also criticized Scienceblogs.com in the past, but only because they said some rather bad things about us, including trying to start a rumor we were a front for the Discovery Institute and a few other things unimportant now. Since that time, they have linked to us when they saw something they liked just as we have done for them.
So my advice to readers and independent science bloggers would be - if you don't like the science bloggers you see out there, stop letting Technorati decide who you read.
