Keso weighs in on Xu Jing Lei and Technorati: Sina partly to blame

Leading Chinese IT blogger Keso (who himself gets tens of thousands of page views a day) weighs in on Xu Jing Lei's blog being number 1 on Technorati by suggesting that if Sina had a more "traditional" blog structure, her lead over BoingBoing would be even greater.

Danwei, in discussing Keso's post, says:

Xu Jinglei's blog is hosted on Sina, whose system draws no connection between a blog's front page and the individual comment pages below it. Front pages are of the form http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/xujinglei, while pages are indexed as http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/46f37fb501000317.

Keso says (via Danwei translation):

What I want to say is that even if Xu Jinglei's blog has claimed the top spot on the Technorati 100, compared with the leading advantages of Boing Boing, it in fact should be much, much higher than Technorati's figures. The vast majority of actual links have been swallowed by Sina's selfish blog system - these links all point to the non-existent blog blog.sina.com.cn/u, or to Sina's blog home page.

In sum, Sina's "blog" service has permalinks, but the links are not associated with any blogger. This means that Technorati's figure of 28,151 sites and 45,700 links to Xu Jing Lei's blog are to her front page alone and do not include any of her permalinks.

The bigger picture here is that blog service providers from China and other countries may not follow the "rules" that have been laid out in the west (either implicitly or explicitly) which Technorati and other blog search tools use to create such rankings or indexes. For that matter, bloggers may blog differently in every country (for example, in using trackbacks or even RSS feeds). It would be difficult to expect Technorati to keep up with each country's unique expression of Web 2.0 or "user generated media." Realizing this, however, means that we have to take rankings such as the Technorati 100 with a grain of salt (especially if we want to consider them as global rankings) and understand that they likely under-represent large chunks of user generated media.