…and The Register is just another weblog, despite Orlowski’s rants about blogs being nothing but idle chatter. After all, one of the most basic definitions of a weblog comes from Rebecca Blood‘s oft-referenced essay, “Weblogs: A history and Perspective“, where she defines a weblog as “a website that is updated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page.” Sounds like a description of The Reg’s front page to me…

Orlowski also complains about the poor quality of information found in most weblogs, but he’s got blinders on when he’s looking at his own columns and his home publication, since his own writing is full of fantasies and misstatements. It’s sometimes claimed that one of the big differences between weblogs and “real” journalism is the absence of editors in weblogs. Well, if there’s an editor going over Andy’s work, she should think about another profession.

For instance, a real journalist — not a fantasist like Jayson Blair, or a third-rate pop-culture ranter/Dennis Miller wannabe like Orlowski — wouldn’t put quotation marks around an inflammatory statement by Professor Larry Lessig if Lessig had never made that statement. A real journalist wouldn’t then go on to title and build his entire article around that misquote. Typical Orlowski straw man tactics.

This latest straw man is just like his previous rant about the “blog noise problem”, which sprang from a wishful interpretation of a statement by Google’s CEO. Andy bases his baseless comments on such eminent sources as “Chris Roddy, a politics and linguistics undergraduate at the University of Emory” (if you’d run this claptrap past an editor, you’d find out that it’s actually “Emory University“, Andy) who was writing on Slashdot, a site I love, but one which is hardly known as a bastion of objective reporting. (Another minor quibble, Andy: Mr. Roddy’s post contained no capitalization, so when correcting it for an article, a real journalist would have noted the alterations.)

The straw man for this article is in this statement:

First of all, why assume there are one million bloggers? I can’t seem to find any reliable source for this number, although Blogger reported it had exceeded 1,000,000 registered users in January; LiveJournal reports more than a million registered users, with nearly a half-million “active” users; other weblogging packages, such as Movable Type, GreyMatter, b2 and Radio Userland don’t make their numbers as readily available. So, I guess “one million” was just a nice big number for Andy to use — one which can’t be proven and can’t be refuted.

Second of all, why “generously” assume 100 pages per blog? I’m hardly the longest-term or most prolific weblogger, and I’ve managed to put together 187 entries in my just-shy-of-a-year writing this weblog, each of which has its own page, as well as being represented on monthly pages, category pages, comment pages and trackback pages. Some webloggers certainly have fewer pages and there are many who have far more pages, but if asked how many pages are on the average webloggers site, a real journalist wouldn’t pull a number out of his ass like Orlowski does.

Third of all, if you are going to make up numbers, at least check your mathematics when you operate on them: 1 million bloggers x 100 pages each = 100 million pages; 100,000,000 ass-pulled weblog pages divided by the 3,083,324,652 total pages in Google’s index doesn’t work out to “0.032 per cent of web content indexed by Google.” It works out to 3.2 percent of web content. 2 orders of magnitude, Andy! That’d be like taking his US$50,000 per year salary (just a guess) and reducing it to US$500 per year. (He’d still be overpaid.) If we use his numbers, that means that 1 out of every 33 pages on the web belongs to a weblog. With that kind of penetration, it doesn’t take any anomalies in Google’s PageRank to account for the (claimed) prevalence of weblog pages in search results.

But the biggest lie in the paragraph results from Orlowski’s shameless misquoting of a Pew Internet & American Life Project study entitled The Internet and the Iraq war. The study says nothing about blog writers, and its mention of blog readers, which Orlowski grabs onto, is more complex than his simple-minded quotation. Here’s the full quote:

Notice the phrase “early data” and the absence of the quoted phrase, “statistically insignficant”. Unlike Mr. Orlowski, the Pew folks understand that “statistically insignificant” indicates a conclusion, while claiming that it is “not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions” indicates the inability to draw a conclusion. That’s because, in their methodology, the Pew researchers report that their survey indicates a “margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.” Meaning that, instead of being insignificant, it’s indeterminate.

Sorry for the extensive entry, but pompous morons with axes to grind really piss me off. I know several other webloggers (Fred at Ochsenshirt.com, and Andrew Ó Baoill at funferal.com, for instance) have commented on Orlowski’s fantasies, but I haven’t seen any analysis of his math skills. I know The Reg prides itself on “biting the hand that feeds IT”, but as long as they give Andy a platform, they just bite.