Remembering The Truth Laid Bear
Remember The Truth Laid Bear?
It’s okay if you don’t. I’ve mentioned the blog directory/search engine to a few dialed in friends recently and received blank stares. At one time it was a pretty big deal though, at least within the bourgeoning blogospheric community during the middle of this decade.
The search and ranking system were always a little bit wonky, but what I loved about TTLB was its blogosphere ecosystem page. Beyond the fact that I’ve always been obsessed with rankings and statistics and numbers, TTLB did a few things really really well.
• Its ecosystem mimicked the real ecosystem – On the “lower” or less popular end, blogs are ranked into broad groupings such as Insignificant Microbes, Multicellular Microorganisms, and Wiggly Worms. Rankings are based on “the number of incoming links [blogs] receive from other weblogs on the list.” As blogs increase links and influence they “evolve” into categories such as Crawly Amphibians, Slithering Reptiles, and Marauding Marsupials. The most popular blogs according to TTLB take on lofty titles such as Playful Primates, Mortal Humans, and, at the very top, Higher Beings. I love the tongue-in-cheek titles and think that they did a great job of parsing the blogosphere into relative categories. A TechCrunch or DailyKos really is a “higher being” as compared to a blog with eight visitors a day, you know?
• It provided a daily snapshot of the growing blogosphere – I used to visit TTLB every day (particularly to see where Blogcritics was sitting in the mix), and it was interesting to watch the leading “higher beings” of the time flip flop rankings with one another. The overall trend was explosive growth. Back in the day, I kept an eye on the 100,000 page view mark (they used to use estimated page views as a main metric) and noted how achieving that milestone placed you relatively lower on the list as more and more blogs started to see serious traffic.
• It gave a quick snapshot of The Powers That Be – While I’m sure a few major players were missing, keeping an eye on TTLB allowed you to quickly know who really mattered in the blogosphere each day. Daily Kos, Instapundit, Gawker, and Boing Boing were then as now megapowers.
• It provided an early read on trends – Checking out TTLB over time revealed some interesting trends, including the rise of gossip blogs and the voracious appetite for gossipy content (which continues today of course) and the explosion of blog networks such as b5media and SB Nation.
What’s up with TTLB today? That’s a good question. I vaguely recall that it went through regular service outages some years ago, and at some point dropped out of my daily rotation. A bit of research doesn’t reveal much, though a few people seem to concur that TTLB is sadly “dead” or at least has been cast adrift for a good long while. (The current rankings don't seem to make a lot of sense and site blog hasn't been updated in nearly two years.)
The march to provide quality blog rankings goes on, of course. Today, Alexa and Compete and others are striving to provide the best and most comprehensive Internet-wide rankings and stats, while Technorati is a major player in the blog ranking space.
(this post originally appeared on Technorati)
