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Carl Bialik, writer of the Wall Street Journal’s The Numbers Guy column, and its blogger liason, is getting around. He’s being widely quoted as an expert on blogs, even though he doesn’t have one.
MyrtleBeachOnline.com ran a Sunday article quoting Bialik’s May 26 column which said that it’s not the number of blogs in the world that matters, but rather the number of items posted by bloggers.
And then there is this strange line: “In any event, blog readership appears small compared with well-known Web sites.” Huh? That’s an apple and an orange and it adds up to nonsense. “Very few individual blogs have a significant number of readers,” Bialik wrote. Of course he also wrote about 3000 other words on the topic in the same column, but I guess the Mrytle Beach writer isn’t big into reading about blogs.
Since the Journal is an expensive subscription, and since bloggers routinely linked to stories through their own subs, the Journal decided to join us instead of trying to beat us. Bialik has been doing a good job of staying in touch with bloggers, sending us free links to Journal stories that match our interests, which he asked us about a couple of weeks ago. Now I guess the Journal is doing a PR campaign on Bialik as a blog expert.