He'll certainly be missed there. He is (was) their cultural junkyard dog, taking on anyone who dared to write non-corporate-media science on the Internet and implementing their Borg mentality toward bloggers.
His article is thoughtful and detailed but he still manages to take some shots at other sites in classic Bora style, writing:
Nature Network whose target audience are primarily scientists rather than lay public, and Science 2.0 (formerly Scientificblogging.org, not to be confused with the similarly named but very new and interesting Science 2.0 network that does more than just blogging) seem to be pretty open and approachable and have nice internal communities, but are essentially invisible from the outside. Likewise for Discovery Networks Blogs.Which means he thinks Nature and Discovery and us (well, the small part of us that is blogging, anyway) are invisible - perhaps he is hoping for a job with his old friends at Discover Blogs so he doesn't snipe them , or he really does not know what other sites do if they are not former Scienceblogs people. More of a concern, he endorses a site that the Open Science Foundation says has stolen their code and, if you see it, looks like high school homework, so his renewed efforts to dilute the actual Science 2.0 here by calling them "interesting" and encouraging their piracy is unfortunate but not unexpected. His competitive goggles don't come off unless you pay him, it seems. He also thinks Scienceblogs is doing better than it is (payola blogs being proof they obviously are not) by citing one of those free traffic estimators that uses a panel of Zwinky-ad clickers and extrapolates them out to the entire Internet ... but if Scienceblogs is a runaway juggernaut and no one else is, the poor economic and ethical choices there make even less sense.
But I remembered seeing the freebie traffic estimators before and they weren't accurate then either, so I don't think he is as much cherry picking data as he is not understanding what is good data versus bad so that may be why he is confused that Scienceblogs appears to be huge yet makes no money. In this period below, we are bigger than Scienceblogs, though it was impossible to be so then, since that was our first year. Also of note, the top site would seem to be one that only does press releases, despite the fact that I know our marketing partner Livescience has 6 million uniques a month, as does Comscore - the panel (they charge money) that is used by actual advertisers:
Yet in 2008 it looks like we went out of business completely, despite the fact that our traffic almost doubled again:
What changed? Nothing. 50 people on their panel got replaced by others who did not read us, I suppose.
Not just anyone can be basically literate and well-spoken yet mind-numbingly incorrect when it comes to understanding data. His constant jibes at us aside, he has his moments and he will be missed over there - but he will still be at http://coturnix.wordpress.com/ so bookmark him accordingly.
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