In a rather blatant case of Monday-morning neener-neener, LAist tweaks blogging.la with a side-by-side comparison of site traffic stats.
LAist publisher Jake Dobkin of Gothamist posted a chart of Sitemeter stats showing that LAist's "visit session" numbers are running more than twice as high as blogging.la's ...
Not to toot our own horns, but LAist is now the most popular group blog in Los Angeles. By a longshot! We can't thank our readers enough- and we can't wait to show you all the new features and writers we'll be introducing over the next couple of months. Come on back, y'all! (The traffic data from our friends at Blogging.la is courtesy of their Sitemeter)
Jake adds further insult to injury in comments:
the blogging.la idea is not that strong- it's just a bunch of people who live in LA blogging as they would normally do on their own site. there's no central voice, no recurring features, no interest in really building up anything. i think you could create a better blogging.la pretty easily- just pick the ten best individual LA blogs, pull their RSS, and aggregate them. Voila- you'd have something a lot better than blogging.la, and you wouldn't even have to coordinate anyone.
What, precisely LAist hopes to accomplish by this charmless act of sword-brandishing is not entirely clear. It's not as though either site is drowning in valuable ad accounts that are ripe for takeover. Maybe it's a way of drumming up false controversy - and thus, inflating interest in LAist. I mean hell, look here, I took the bait, and other comments are posted at LABlogs.
But I'd always been under the (perhaps naive) impression that competitively-minded bloggers stuck to arguing each other's points or style, and refrained from the tacky business of comparing the size of each other's ... audiences. Live and learn. It'll be interesting to see whether Sean, Jason and company take the bait.
UPDATE: A flame-skirmish has erupted on the LAist post between Dobkin and clearly displeased blogging.la folks.
I dropped Sean an email asking him for his take on this off the record - a friendly query from a fellow blogger. Here's his complete response at 11:23 a.m. today:
First of all, I honestly don't give a rats ass what Jake Dobkin thinks of me, or my sites, or our plans, or our goals. He's just trying to make himself feel better by knocking someone else down and I think that's pretty obvious to everyone. He's constantly pointing at us sneering "look, they aren't doing XXX right" but we're not trying to do XXX so who fuckin g cares. He's obviously very concerned with us, and really bothered that we aren't with him.
This stat thing is retarded. Everyone knows that all stats counters record things differently, so pitting a public site meter stat against his internal tracking software is like saying "checking out how much better my fresh orange juice is than his stale beer." We have several stats programs running on the site and all give different numbers. He's tried this before and he'll try it again. If his stupid little games make him feel better then more power too him but this is way too petty for me to bother dealing with, or responding to.
And that is on the record.
Thanks for asking.
-sean
Meanwhile, H2BH.com posted a snappy parody of LAist's boast, complete with chart, touting H2BH as the leader in smack talk among L.A. group blogs.
