I’m having a good laugh all the way over here in London thanks to Fake Steve Jobs.

Oh, my. Turns out that Valleywag printed a rumor about Facebook’s founder that turned out not to be true. That isn’t all that different from the average Valleywag post but this one got picked up by a bunch of bloggers who drove it to the top of TechMeme (now the retraction is on the top of TechMeme, which demonstrates that there is a self-correcting function there). My friends and I have been comparing notes about what kinds of things get onto Valleywag and why we all love reading Valleywag (the insiders, at least, normal people have no interest in a Silicon Valley gossip rag).

Now that I’m over in London I get to see the media that Valleywag is patterned after. Over here they don’t have really serious newspapers. That’s what the BBC is for, after all. But every store sells these gossip papers that scream at you with huge type. They go for the most salacious of topics. Just like Valleywag does. After all, if Scoble picks his nose, that’s more interesting than what Oracle announced in a press release this morning, right? Heh.

Anyway, my friends have learned that they can quite easily game Valleywag and get Valleywag to print almost any damn thing. Here’s some rules for gaming Valleywag:

1. You need a somewhat credible source. So, if you want to get something onto Valleywag about me, or about PodTech, you’ve gotta have a former employee, or someone who works inside PodTech. Or, if you’re really good, you figure out how to get a Podtech email address and you send a tip that way. If you’re really good, you send an email from an email address that LOOKS like it might be coming from a PodTech employee. For instance, send them an email from robertscoble@podtech.com. Hint, we’re a “.net” but Valleywag doesn’t really check out news tips, so as long as things look pretty close you’ll probably get your rumor printed.

2. You need a story that’s both salacious and sounds plausible. Zuckerberg selling $40 million in stock fit both. Can you come up with some of your own? Heck, practice on me. “Scoble to go back to work for Microsoft.” “Scoble is a frigtard.” “Fat blogger almost killed in London.” “Scoble enters TechCrunch deadpool.” Etc. Etc.

3. The story must fit Valleywag’s story line. So, don’t bother sending a news article saying something like “Scoble turns out to be nice guy.” That will never get printed, even if you could add a salacious angle to it. Valleywag’s editors have decided I’m evil incarnate, so if you want to get something printed about me you’ve gotta make sure it fits that story line.

4. Send it at a time when it’ll be hard for them to check it out. Notice that that story about Zuckerberg broke on Friday evening. Everyone knows that PR people are harder to find on Friday evening cause they are usually out at the company beer bash or getting ready for a weekend, especially if they had a rough week. Remember: PR people have lives. Bloggers don’t. Take advantage of that. Truth be told Valleywag doesn’t call the subject of their stories anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. But the lie will go further if PR people can’t be reached for comment by other bloggers/journalists who MIGHT actually try to follow up on the rumor.

5. Send the story from multiple sources. Only one really needs to be halfway credible. The others will just ensure that the tip is taken seriously.

6. Take advantage of the fact that many bloggers will reprint the story as fact, even if it comes from Valleywag. This will soon wear off, though, as more and more bloggers realize that Valleywag is playing them. I’ve removed Valleywag from my link blog and didn’t print this item, even though tons of bloggers had printed it because there wasn’t a second source other than Valleywag.

Why do these tactics work? Because Valleywag doesn’t call sources to check facts and Valleywag doesn’t really care about whether something is true or not before printing it. Jason Calacanis wrote recently that he used this fact to get Valleywag to hype up his new company with a series of fake email tips.

So, why do we love this kind of news? The British press sure demonstrates that millions of people like this kind of salacious stuff.

1. We like human misery. Especially if someone more popular than us, or richer than us, is going through the misery.

2. We like talking about other people. “Did you hear that…”

3. There’s nothing like conflict to get our attention antenna up. A good fight gets us all worked up.

4. Sex sells. It’s quite obvious that lots of magazines and newspapers write the headlines before they even have any content. Look at the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, or a dozen of its competitors. I guarantee that at least one of them has a headline with something like “100 new ways to please your lover.” These kinds of headlines sell magazines and they never seem to change too much. So, in the tech industry, “100 new ways to piss off Mike Arrington” will probably get you more hits than “100 new Office 2.0 apps.” Even if it’s actually better for you to try out some new Office 2.0 apps. Heck, look at Valleywag right now. It’s all about Larry Page’s wedding and has salacious shots of him making out with his new wife.

Why am I writing about this? Cause I’m a sucker for all this. Even as they throw me under the bus again and again, I love it so much I keep reading it. It’s a personal bug of mine and one I’ve tried to work on, but everyone has to have their stupid addictions, right?

OK, enough fun on a Sunday morning from the gossip capital of the world. Back to more mundane things like testing out new RSS readers.

Valleywag yesterday begged its readers to click on a link to me so that it could beat Fake Steve Jobs for the title of “most clicky audience.” So, I thought I’d post my referer log to show you who is sending the most hits. FSJ is still 7x more clicky. Too bad Nick Denton! :-)

Here’s my Fake Steve Jobs story (Fake Steve Jobs is a blog that pretends it’s written by Apple CEO/co-founder Steve Jobs. It got popular this year and recently it was revealed that a Forbes Magazine employee is its author).

Last week I was getting an iced latte at the new Peets in Half Moon Bay. I was wearing a Blogger T-shirt. Old school. There a lady came up to me and asked “is that the Fake Steve Jobs T-shirt?”

I remembered that FSJ published his blog on Blogger and figured the Blogger logo was confusing this lady who assumed it was FSJ’s logo. Blogger, as you know, is the blog service from Google which was started by Evan Williams, er, evhead.

Anyway, I explained to her that the logo wasn’t really Fake Steve Jobs, but rather the tool he published with. Demonstrates that there’s a lot of brand power in Fake Steve Jobs.

As she walked away she said “I love Fake Steve Jobs.”

Truth be told I love FSJ too. Why?

Well.

1. He’s funny, even when he attacks me.
2. Everytime he links he sends boatloads of traffic. I don’t know why I love that, but it makes me happy to see that Fake Steve Jobs has boatloads more readers than Valleywag does (Valleywag says they have tons of traffic, but they don’t click on anything. I’ve been on both sites dozens of times and FSJ’s audience clicks at 20x the rate that Valleywag’s does).
3. He’s been talking about me looking for a job lately which brings a big smile to my face although someone shoot me if I ever take a CEO job. That doesn’t sound fun to me at all. Lucrative, yes, but not fun and I simply wouldn’t be good at that.
4. He’s a lot better writer than I am.
5. He’s a lot better speaker than I am.
6. He has a cool job at a big business magazine (Forbes).

I wish I could get FSJ on my show. Something fun would be to do a little debate about something. Remember, the guy who writes Fake Steve Jobs is actually a Forbes magazine employee, Daniel Lyons. He was the guy who wrote a cover article back in 2005 about how blogs sucked. Everyone who thinks Daniel is such a great blogger should go back and read that article and compare his beliefs back then with FSJ today. Oh, sorry, that’s not funny.

I wonder if Daniel still feels the same way about blogs attacking brand value now that he uses a blog to attack other people, companies, and things?

Or, we could be more professional and debate industry topics like the state of Apple’s brand value or whether the Amazon Kindle is well designed or not.

Hmmm, maybe we should just do a panel session at a conference and debate about how much value Facebook is going to destroy due to horrible PR? That might be entertaining.

Facebook has the most controlling PR department outside of Apple and it sure is in the middle of a PR crisis right now.

I feel ambivalent about the troubles Facebook is having right now. Personally I’m having lots of trouble with Facebook but Facebook doesn’t care about people who have more than 5,000 friends unless they can figure out a way to monetize us. Everytime I look at Facebook I am reminded of how little Facebook cares about me. So, I care less and less about Facebook every day.

My phone number is on my Facebook entry. Interesting that Facebook could use me to answer the community’s concerns. I’d give them hours of video time on my show. But they only seem interested in talking to big-brand journalists and I’m not interested enough to pull out my Fast Company business cards to get them to pay attention. They should invite 40 bloggers who are lower on the TechMeme leaderboard than me and just have a conversation about the mess they are in. But they’ll never do that because they are so damn controlling about what they say and who they say it to.

For completeness, here’s Facebook’s official answer to the latest troubles with its Beacon advertising scheme.

Anyway, that was a really long entry to say that I’d rather read Fake Steve Jobs than log into Facebook lately. At least with FSJ I get entertained as I get bashed. With Facebook I just am reminded that there’s more than 1,000 people that I can’t help because of Facebook’s lame scalability issues. MySpace or upstart Zude are sure looking better and better. Just get that OpenSocial platform done and let’s get on with it!

OK, there were only a few bloggers on this panel (Kara Swisher, Rob Hof, and me), but lots of famous journalists from Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNBC, and Forbes. All trying their hardest to give predictions of what’s coming next year in tech.

In a separate video this panel took questions from the audience, which mostly made up hundreds of PR folks in Silicon Valley.

Of course I was only half joking in this headline. Kara and Rob did a much better job than I did (they should, Kara works for DowJones and Rob works for BusinessWeek) and the panel was a lot of fun. Hopefully I didn’t say too many things that’ll show up on Valleywag over the weekend.

This is an Apple ad:

Done by Apple. More on that later.

So, last night I was out to dinner with a bunch of smart people. Folks who run their own companies. Folks who have helped many companies get started. Tech companies.

Of course people started talking about my Apple problems. Everyone at the table is a Macintosh user. What was fun is that at one point people started telling me about the problems they have had with their Macs. Many with far more serious problems than I have had.

I tried to turn on my video camera. They all instantly shut up and said “no video.”

Why not?

I dug a little more. It was because they all blamed themselves for the problems of their Macs and I think they also bought into the “Apple cult” which says that if you use a Mac you must be cool. Heck, look at that ad again. Who is cool? Not the PC user.

Now THAT is “brand promise.”

We believe Apple’s marketing so deeply that we aren’t willing to question it.

And then there’s something else. Apple has an ARMY of people who are anonymous who will come and call you every name in the book. I know. They hit yesterday here. I deleted them all, but, dozens, if not hundreds, of comments calling me every name in the book.

They hit over on Andy Beal’s site too. He got tired and just closed the comment thread over there.

The common thing about most of these comments is that it’s MY FAULT that my Apple machine is having trouble.

See, on my Windows machine I’m willing to accept this. After all, I know that Microsoft can’t really test every combination of hardware out there. My Windows machines can take dozens, if not hundreds, of different video cards, sound cards, hard drives, memory configurations, etc. The thing is on my Mac I didn’t load any third-party RAM — Apple’s brand promise is that you never will need to open your box to customize it. Heck, the iPhone goes further. You CAN’T customize it and if you try you have to “break” into it. I’ve never opened the box, or tried to do some weird stuff. I’m even pretty protective about what I load on this system. Why? Cause my world has moved to the Internet and browser-based apps. No need to install tons of software like I used to on my Windows boxes.

I watch that video over and over again and I get really pissed.

Pissed enough to say “screw you Apple” all over again.

Some of you (hi Fake Steve Jobs) misunderstood my point about Apple PR’s not wanting to give me free or loaner hardware. See, I know Apple sends free or loaner hardware to certain journalists. But only those it deems “important.” Steven Levy. Walt Mossberg. Those types. They got iPhones two weeks before those of us who were “unimportant” could BUY them in the stores.

The point isn’t that I want free (er loaned) hardware. It’s that Apple uses that free hardware to MANUFACTURE the “myth” of Apple as being great, and good, and “cool.” Also, if these guys want to get more free or loaner Apple hardware before the rest of us they need to make sure not to point out too many flaws in it. Yeah, they can point out a few, but they know they got picked because they generally write pro-Apple stuff. It’s a reason why I don’t want free stuff and why I waited in line to be among the first in the Valley to have my own iPhone.

Again. Brand promise of Apple. Only those who will give Apple a fair shake will get the goods. When Fake Steve Jobs says I’ll never get invited to another Apple press conference again he isn’t too far from the truth! Retribution is a bitch.

UPDATE: That’s not totally fair on my part. I know these journalists will report when they are sent something that doesn’t do what it promises. I need to correct this post. The journalists don’t get free products that they get to keep (most of the times). They do send them back. I’m sorry to the journalists who I made this point about. Walt Mossberg has an ethics statement where he talks about this.

UPDATE 2: Ryan Block, who writes for Engadget, has a good set of replies to my claims above.

It’s the brand promise of Apple. You will have to BUY your Apple after those “famous journalists” get to use one for free for two weeks and you vil like it. Oh, and you’ll beg to be let into a Steve Jobs keynote because you vil want to sit at the feet of Jobs and drool on the floor like the idiot blogger you are.

Just remember the brand promise of Apple, OK?

1. If your machine behaves badly it’s your fault.
2. Any idiot can use an Apple machine (that’s what they tell you before you buy one) but if your machine crashes then you must be a “genius” to fix it (they have bars at stores now where you can “borrow” a genius, but only after waiting in line — my son twice has been turned away from genius bars because they were too busy and was told to “come back tomorrow at 10 a.m.”). Oh, and if you are having problems at 10 p.m., and dare tell people on your blog about your problems you’ll get tons of abuse back “how DARE you be an Apple user and not know you needed to flash your PRAM.” Translation: any idiot can use a Mac, but not really.
3. If you dare complain about the brand promise you’ll get pounced on by hoardes of annonymous astroturfing Apple FanBois.
4. If you don’t get the brand promise of Apple don’t attempt to point out that the ads are ridiculous. Instead, just leave the cult and go back to using that “inferior” machine you used to use.
5. Check out my new Mac, with its cool brushed metal surface and the light-up Apple logo.
6. If you use an Apple machine you will be as cool as Kevin Rose.

Baratunde has it right when he says “I hate the smugness of Apple.”

Oh, and to the guy who says I’m a Microsoft shill. You better check your facts there. Over the past year I’ve spent more than $10,000 on Apple products of MY OWN MONEY and if you include the machines I’ve bought for PodTech, I’ve spent more than $20,000. Not to mention my son and I spent two days in line waiting for our iPhones. Now if THAT is what you call “shilling for Microsoft” I wonder what “shilling for Apple would look like?”

I guess I just am not cool enough to like my Mac. I’m back on my Sony Vaio, which has never crashed the way my Mac did the other night. It also never has needed to have its memory and graphics controller replaced the way my Mac did. And its USB ports work, unlike those on my son’s computer. But it decidedly isn’t cool.

It doesn’t come with the brand promise of Apple.

Oh, and back to that ad at the top of my blog? Have you ever met the PR guy for Microsoft? That’s Frank Shaw. A really nice guy. He even has a blog (idiot! — Apple hires all the “cool” PR people and they never will do a blog) Who does PR for Apple? Katie Cotton. She’s a LOT closer to the PR lady in that video above, which is TOTALLY ironic — watch this video again and compare to the ad above. Brilliant marketing.

I just loaded the latest Apple Macintosh updates.

Now my machine won’t boot. Well, that’s not really true. When I power it up the Apple comes on. Then the screen gets dark and a little message comes up:

“You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.”

So I restart. And get the same message. I do it five times just to make sure.

And so, now I’m back on my Windows machine.

Screw you Apple and your ads saying you’re better than Microsoft. Screw you. Screw you. Screw you.

Screw you and your controlling PR machine.

Grrrrr.

Oh, and if you think I have something against Apple, no I don’t. But my computer, a 17-inch MacBookPro, has already been in the shop twice. My son’s MacBookPro 15-inch has been in the shop twice and has a dead USB port now so both of our machines need to go back into the shop.

What’s ironic is lots of other computer companies would LOVE to give me free stuff (I don’t take it) but Apple is the only company that’s never raised a PR finger to help me. Instead I feel so honored to spend my money on this crap. Why? Just to have a shiny machine?

Well, sorry. The shine is wearing off. Screw you Apple.

Today I learned that I actually work for Valleywag, but don’t get paid.

Hey, Valleywag is the Android of journalism!

For those of you who don’t get that: I do the work, Paul Boutin points out my messes. He Nick Denton keeps the advertising revenues. Sorta like working for Google on an open source cell phone project.

Works just like Android except replace “that loser Scoble” with “developers.” Oh, well, at least with Android they are handing out $10 million in prize money. With Valleywag my friends and coworkers call and email to point out what a loser I am. Hey!

Oh, and Ryan Block at Engadget told me he had his hands on Android.

Damn, double loser! :-)

Now that my player has been on TechCrunch and Valleywag I’ve been able to measure some new things about each of their audiences:

1. Audience. Just how many people visit their page (Kyte.tv shows me how many people are online concurrently. Valleywag has been averaging about 200 to 300 people, TechCrunch averaged around 1000).
2. Engagement. How many people click on links, or comment on items. TechCrunch regularly gets more than 100 comments. Valleywag rarely gets more than 10. When TechCrunch linked to me I got 1,000 visits. When Valleywag links to me it’s rare I get more than 100.
3. Loyalty. How many subscriptions do each site have on Google Reader and other feed readers. I use the example of Gizmodo vs. Engadget. Gizmodo has about 44,000 subscribers while Engadget has 350,000, on Google Reader.
4. Influence. % of posts that show up on Techmeme, Digg, my Link Blog, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, etc.

Anyone building a new metric based on these four things? If so, we could REALLY understand a LOT more about our audiences and advertisers would have a lot better information to choose from.

I’d probably add a fifth metric:

5. Concentration of people with intent. Does your site attract a lot of people who buy digital cameras, for instance? Then it’ll make a LOT more on Google advertising. That’s one huge reason why DPReview sold for a good sum to Amazon.

Anyway, this gave me a chance to dust off my old whiteboard. Oh, on my whiteboard is the Social Media Starfish. Yes, that’s a tease. I’m writing about that for Fast Company Magazine.

UPDATE: This list is no longer accurate. Google updated the numbers last night and they all changed pretty dramatically. I’ll update the list later this week when I have time.

Darren Rowse on ProBlogger showed me how to look up how many subscribers I have on Google Reader.

So, I went looking for some numbers.

Keep in mind that these are ONLY for Google Reader, which is only a small percentage of subscribers (although a growing number).

First, though, let’s look at the TechMeme Leaderboard. The numbers of Google Reader subscribers are in parenthesis.

1. TechCrunch (Google Reader says: 117,690 subscribers on one URL, 11,470 on another — this is for US site)
2. New York Times (33,159 for front page, 5,298 for top 10 most emailed items)
3. Engadget (146,449, it lists a number of others too — compare to only 28,289 for Gizmodo)
4. Ars Technica (about 19,000 in quick add up of all their feeds)
5. CNET News.com (14,395)
6. Read/WriteWeb (8,479)
7. The Register (5,826 for main feed, 1,208 for headlines)
8. GigaOM (5,393 subscribers, plus 1,840 for ommalik feed)
9. Silicon Alley Insider (unknown)
10. Computerworld (1,341 for breaking news, 1,959 for top news)
11. InfoWorld (889 for TechWatch blog, 4,384 for top news)
12. eWEEK.COM (5,021 for tech news, about 1,000 for other feeds)
13. Wall Street Journal (2,033 subscribers)
14. Associated Press (532 subscribers)
15. paidContent.org (401 subscribers)
16. AppleInsider (16,326. Compare to 16,646 for MacRumors)
17. BBC (202,463 for front page, 6,971 for Tech)
18. Crave: The gadget blog (3,136)
19. Search Engine Land (3,910, none for new Sphinn)
20. Reuters (4,006 for top news)
21. BusinessWeek (7,209, 3,617 for tech)
22. Bits, New York Times tech Blog (212)
23. Techdirt (12,628)
24. Webware.com (4,071)
25. TorrentFreak (981)
26. Between the Lines (1,588)
27. CrunchGear (4,190)
28. CenterNetworks (254)
29. All About Microsoft (542)
30. VentureBeat (1,138)
31. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (15,457)
32. Gizmodo (28,289)
33. Scripting News (7,594 for Dave Winer’s main blog and 339 for his annex)
34. Rough Type, Nick Carr (1,801)
35. Microsoft (MSDN Blogs where employees blog, 1,357; MSDN magazine, 1,413, Microsoft Research, 2,276, MSDN just published, 5,452, Microsoft’s press releases, 463. Compare to Mini-Microsoft, 3,246. There are a variety of others, but none higher than these)
36. BoomTown + Kara Swisher + AllThingsD (1,325 on Huffington Post, 377 on AllThingsD, 124 on BoomTown)
37. Wired News (104,159 for top stories, 4,291 for science, 2,729 for gadgets. Compare to Google News, which has 192,100).
38. mathewingram.com/work (18)
39. Business Wire (I couldn’t find data here)
40. Scobleizer (600 for ScobleShow, 4894 for Scobleizer, 29 to my Twitter feed,
41. NewTeeVee (1,439)
42. Tech Trader Daily (360)
43 A VC (Fred Wilson) (4,053)
44. PR Newswire (254)
45. Publishing 2.0 (1,270)
46. Forbes (1,058 on Tech News)
47. DailyTech (about 5,500 on main news feed)
48. Epicenter, Wired blog (351)
49. O’Reilly Radar (13,345)
50. Los Angeles Times (415 for top news, 947 for local, 935 for print edition)
51. Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog (597)
52. Times of London (988 for UK News from Times Online)
53. All Facebook (196)
54. Valleywag (5897)
55. Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim (1,656)
56. Inquirer (4,908)
57. WebProNews (about 500)
58. The Jason Calacanis Weblog (2,809)
59. Google LatLong (2,210)
60. ZDNet (930)
61. Download Squad (9,095)
62. Google Operating System (12,284)
63. Official Google Blog (71,283 — the Google Reader blog has 49,242)
64. The Boy Genius Report (1,629)
65. Guardian (7,448, 1,750 on World Latest)
66. PC World (2,279 on latest technology news)
67 Google Blogoscoped (41,387)
68. Infinite Loop (1,987)
69. Macworld (10,545, 843 in top stories)
70. Digital Daily (see Kara Swisher above)
71. Istartedsomething (380)
72. Mashable! (8,763)
73. Engadget Mobile (5,673 for mobile feed)
74. 9 to 5 Mac (76)
75. Guardian Unlimited (7448, 1,750 for World Latest)
76. Financial Times (638. Compare to 176,814 for MarketWatch.com)
77. Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo’s blog (1,050)
78. MediaShift (784)
79. Yahoo! Search Blog (3,509)
80. Washington Post (5,197, 3,502 for politics)
81. Inside AdSense (4,325)
82. Broadcasting & Cable (63)
83. Akihabaranews.com (226)
84. Google Public Policy Blog (1,397)
85. comScore (526)
86: the::unwired (458)
87: ProBlogger Blog Tips (4,586)
88. Think Secret (10,610)
89. BuzzMachine (Jeff Jarvis) (3,166)
90. Agence France Presse (514)
91. ILounge (4,651)
92. Sprint (I couldn’t find)
93. DigiTimes (474)
94. ipodminusitunes (unknown)
95. Doc Searls Weblog (1,397)
96. Reflections of a Newsosaur (22)
97. Googling Google (1,268)
98. Salon (53,909)
99. Insider Chatter (51)
100. Telegraph (1,260)

TechMeme itself has 10,179.

I also picked some of my favorites to see how they rank
Tantek Celik (402)
Shelley Powers (105)
Tara Hunt (1,083)
Jeremiah Owyang (463)
Scott Beale (1,412)
Rodney Rumford (184)
Blognation (5)
Betsy Devine (73)
danah boyd (2,172)
Shel Israel (552)
Chris Pirillo (2,795)
Stephanie Booth (142)
Daily Kos (7,285)
Daring Fireball (10,878)
Darren Barefoot (359)
Derek Powazek (99)
A List Apart (10,542)
Ryan Stewart (478)
Don Dodge (1,324)
Dare Obasanjo (2,261)
Renee Blodget (178)
Ed Bott (1,113)
Michael Gartenberg (475)
Howard Lindzon (257)
Robert Cringley (5,948)
Jeff Clavier (768)
Jeffrey Zeldman (7,459)
John Battelle (35,976)
Joel Spolsky (26,911)
Tim O’Reilly (10,422)
Joi Ito (1,444)
Jon Udell (3,343)
Loic Le Meur (1,538)
Marc Canter (582)
Dave McClure (122)
Steve Rubel (7,676)
Matt Mullenweg (1,990)
Nick Bradbury (1,287)
Noah Kagan (123)
Paul Boutin (143)
Scott Guthrie (5,511)
Tom Raftery (227)
Thomas Hawk (720)
Uncov (754)
Quotationspage.com: (128,748)
Channel 9 (Microsoft’s video community) (2,268)
Leo Laporte (TwiT.TV, 2,854)
Kevin Rose (389)
Digg (14,247 to Digg/Tech; 109,286 for all News and Videos)
Jonathan Schwartz (3796)
Sun’s blogs (161)
Mark Cuban (8,436)
Guy Kawasaki (7,534)
Seth Godin (36,822)
Tom Peters (2,153)

MediaBlitz has its own analysis of the TechMeme leaderboard numbers. Basically it looks like only 5% of the average blog is read in an RSS reader so multiply these numbers by 20 and you’ll probably get close to real traffic levels.

Tim Bray reminds us that these numbers are ONLY for people who subscribed to the feeds in Google Reader. On his server he has 1,455 subscribers for his RSS, 4,403 for his atom feed, while Google Reader reported 3,690 for his feeds.

I’d love to know how many subscribers you have. Can you look your numbers up and put them in a comment? Remember to add up all the various feeds you have (that’s how I got these numbers above).

Enjoy!

The next step? What are you learning here? For one the BBC is one of the only sites that puts “about News Feeds” next to all of its feed icons (they link to a well done page about how to use News Feeds). Any wonder why they get so many subscribers?

UPDATE: Fred Oliveira says that Feed Burner is reporting to him that he has 2,445 subscribers from Google Reader but Google Reader says that Fred only has 524 subscribers from Google Reader. So, these numbers may be WAY off. But they are the data I had to work with. Would love to hear your stories. Tim Bray says he’s seeing a discrepancy too.

UPDATE #2: I might have missed some of your numbers. I tried to find them all, but please correct what you find if you find some that I missed.

UPDATE: #3: One thing you can’t look up? How many subscribers you have to my Google Reader Shared Items Blog.

UPDATE: #4: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was doing something similar. I need to go to dinner, otherwise I’d put my list in a spreadsheet like that.

Ahh, the Guardian got into a little dirty truth about traffic on TechMeme: there isn’t many people there.

Every time I get on TechMeme I get 500 to 3,000 visits. That matches what the Guardian and what Nick Carr are seeing.

But, truth is not many sites out there do any better. Yeah, when I get on Digg I get 20,000. When I got on the front page of the BBC a couple times in the past month I got 5,000 each time. But Valleywag? I get 100 to 1,000 visits (I’ve been on there something like 20 times including with some VERY sensational posts that would make anyone click and ask themselves “what the heck did that guy do?”)

Even when I quit Microsoft and was in 150 newspapers and TONS of blogs and such I got 200,000 visits in a two-day period.

Dave Winer? A few thousand per link, but sometimes only a few hundred. Wired? A few thousand. Stumbleupon? I got tens of thousands once, but not lately. Twitter? A few hundred, even when dozens of people put my link up.

I was on the Register one time and only got a few hundred visits even though a friend of mine claimed they had millions of visitors.

My own blog? Most links lately will drive a few hundred visits. My link blog seems to be a little bit better, but not much according to people who’ve been on it.

So, if you’ve gotten a good shot of traffic where do you find you get the most traffic?

Oh, and why does TechMeme get the hype? Because Eric Norlin said in his interview with me today that he reads it. If he reads it that’s good enough for me.

I don’t want a big audience. I want a smart audience. So far I’ve gotten exactly that from TechMeme.

If I wanted a big audience I’d go write a Paris Hilton blog or something like that.