Many readers of the Los Angeles Time’s “Bloggers Talk about the ‘Bubble’” article from July 16th came away with the wrong impression about the recent growth of real estate blogs. LAT’s Annette Haddad wrote:

“Since January, the number of sites related to real estate, excluding Realtors’ marketing sites, has jumped 19%, according to online market research firm Hitwise. “

By the use of the word “jump” the Times implied that 19% was a significant increase. It was not. According to blog tracking firms BlogPulse and Technorati, the number of blogs roughly doubled during this time (i.e., 100% increase) while the number of real estate blogs rose only 19%. Would you describe a stock as “jumping” when it has gone up a mere 19% versus the market’s 100%? I don’t think so. You’d probably call it a dog and sell it.

We believe The Times should have used the trend tool by BlogPulse (who are even quoted in the article). By inputting “real estate bubble” into the BlogPulse tool, one can see that the level of real estate activity as a percentage of all blog posts is up dramatically even though the number of blogs on the subject is not. That is an interesting fact that is not misleading.

This isn’t the first time Independent Sources has quibbled with the LAT’s mis-use of Internet/blog data and their over reliance on misapplied Hitwise sound bites. Click here for our posting “Keyword Search: Duh…”

Of course this brings up the question, what are all these new blogs? The answer is everything from random musings about life to blogs dedicated to specific medical issues—and everything in-between. If you are reading Independent Sources and don’t have a blog, we suggest you go to Blogger.com and sign up for a free one. Just remember to link to us!

Technorati: Blogging los angeles times

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 10:23 pm by Insider and is filed under Blogging, Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.