Blog Breakdown 1 - Gadget Blogs

Right well this has quite easily been the hardest five hours work I've ever done - 300 minutes later this sentence is all I have to show for it! These sites just keep sending my brain off on some massive procrastination tangent - so not helpful. But I guess it's a good thing because if I can't turn away from them, I'm sure they must be sucking in a fair few other recreational browsers.

Gizmodo is the primary site that I'm going to review in this category. Some quick statistics:

• Started out in 2002, as part of the Gawker Media Network.
  
• Created (and edited) by Peter Rojas, before his transition to Engadget in 2004.
• Internet traffic averaging 1.6m unique visits/month (i.e. 1.6m different people visit the site).

Gizmodo is one of the many gadget-orientated blogs that can be found on the web these days. Some take a sharper look at gadgets and consumer electronics specifically, whereas others take a broader look at anything that could be considered new and cool. Gizmodo fits into the latter of these two descriptions, for example presently featuring a post about the technology used by paralympic athletes on the first page.

The layout is fairly standard for a blog site - there's the centre column dedicated to the posts, with a narrower column along the left hand side of the page featuring adverts and contact information. However the website has a good style about it, and the large pictures that precede each blog are a nice touch. The search bar on the top of the page works well for navigating the site - simply type in the name of a brand or product you may be looking for (for example Nokia or iPod), and upon returning the search it will bring up all the posts relevant to you.

As competition goes for the site, there are a few large rivals, along with many who boast smaller hit figures. Public enemy #1 would be Engadet.com, which (as previously mentioned) was created by the original founder of Gizmodo, Peter Rojas. Engadget is owned by Weblogs Inc and Time Warner, which could safely be said constitutes some considerable backing, although big money doesn't neccessarily correlate to high levels of hits when it comes to the internet. Engadget has a different feel to it alongside Gizmodo - the layout definately feels more professional (read 'neater'). There is a more consistent style to the page, however I personally find the Gizmodo site much more captivating to read (not to mention distracting to my studies). It definately has more interesting posts than Engadget, which seems to focus more on new hardware than the larger picture of technology uses. Which makes it a bit like this.

Wired.com has a very long past for an internet site - it started all the way back in 1994. Originally a web magazine owned by Lycos (old!old!old!), it was bought out by Conde Nast Publishing's 'Wired' Magazine in 2006, and has since then become the magazine's website. However it still has it's own content, as well as a large range of blogs. The topics cover several different areas, all with a slightly geek/nerd orientation (cars, military tech, games, technology business, etc.), but to be fair to the other two blogs mentioned here I'm only looking at the Gadget blog in particular. It's pretty similar to Engadget, really - nice, clean style, a slight emphasis towards the products rather than general cool news from the gadget world, so in that respect Gizmodo is still riding in comfortably at #1 for entertainment stakes. For information however the Wired gadget blog is probably top of the list, managing to be both more informing and more interesting than Engadget.

Comparing the amount of hits each of the 3 sites mentioned above recieves, Engadget gets almost the exact same number of hits daily as Gizmodo (maybe the same people are checking both out?). Wired.com has a steeper increase over the last year, recently clocking in over 3m unique visits monthly). I could only find data for the main site, not the specific blog pages, so the numbers looking at the gadget blog probably work out at the same number as those looking at Gizmodo and Engadget now.


There are likely hundreds or even thousands of gadget blogs across the web that also count as competetion for the 3 I've just written about, however they dont get anywhere near the number of views of this trio. That said, there were a few that seemed worth writing about. Here's a quick summary of the top 3:

• BoingBoing - 1.4m unique visits/month. Best competitor to Gizmodo in terms of content with a decent mix of upcoming/new products and technology news. The layout is pretty cool, definately on par with Gizmodo.
  
• Ubergizmo - 200,000 unique visits/month. Entirely dedicated to new/cool products. Somehow it seems to work better than some of its larger competitors - The template style is more interesting, and the reviews/previews are informative without being too boring. If you're looking for the newest consumer gadget news specifically then this is well worth checking out.
  
• TheGadgetBlog - 20,000 unique visits/month. It's a shame that more people don't use this blog, because I really liked it. It follows the style of BoingBoing and Gizmodo, in that it does feature some specific consumer products, but it also has interesting news about larger scale projects or related news, which makes it more of a blog in my opinion (rather than a straight out report of a product).

So there are my opinions on gadget blogs. Personally I think Gizmodo, BoingBoing and TheGadgetBlog are doing it best, and would recommend checking them out. Go on...you've got a spare 5 minutes...