WalterGR
(a blog)
Sunday, March 20, 2005
  Are you friendly?

or: In which I present a brief and highly unscientific analysis of blog rankings Technorati's Top 100 Technorati ranks the "most authoritative blogs," based on the number of blog posts that link to a given blog. Bloglines' Most Popular Feeds ranks blogs according to the number of Bloglines users who subscribe to the blog's feed. I was curious if there was a correlation between the two rankings, so I grabbed the lists, culled out the duplicates, and got to work performing some extremely serious number crunching. There were 21 blogs in common between the Technorati and Bloglines rankings. While several blogs had similar positions in the two lists, other blogs differed wildly. Raw data:
BlogTechnoratiBloglinesDelta
The Doc Searls Weblog2397-74
Wil Wheaton dot net1988-69
Wonkette2991-62
Eschaton861-53
Instapundit.com246-44
Talking Points Memo641-35
kottke.org2237-15
Metafilter1832-14
Scripting News2836-8
Boing Boing14-3
Gizmodo46-2
Joi Ito's Web7173-2
Engadget1183
Scobleizer443014
Jeffrey Zeldman's The Daily Report432815
A List Apart341519
kuro5hin.org481830
mezzoblue925636
CNET News.com491237
Joel on Software521042
Lawrence Lessig962967
The table is sorted by the Delta column, which shows the Technorati ranking minus the Bloglines ranking. A high negative delta means that the blog is linked to quite frequently, but there are comparatively far fewer people who subscribe to the feed. A high positive delta means many people subscribe to the blog, but it's not linked to exceptionally often. The absolute value of the delta indicates the degree of skew between the two measures. (Note that positive vs. negative was simply a result of the order of the columns in the spreadsheet.) In other words, some blogs skew very blogger-friendly (or, perhaps, simply "link-friendly",) but not very reader-friendly. For example, Doc Searls' weblog is in the top 25% of linked blogs, but is barely within the list of the top 100 read blogs. In contrast, Lawrence Lessig's blog is in the top third of all read blogs, but receives fewer links than 95% of the top linked blogs. So, bloggers: how friendly are you? And what kind of friendly is that, exactly?
Comments
Blogger Walter GR @ 7:00 PM, March 20, 2005

I tried to come up with some catchier terms than "blogger-friendly" and "reader-friendly", but nothing came to mind. Any ideas?

 

Blogger Walter GR @ 7:10 PM, March 20, 2005

And, FYI, I was being serious when I wrote "highly unscientific" and sarcastic when I wrote "extremely serious number crunching." It would be much better to use a single source that had both subscription and linking rankings.

 

Anonymous Anonymous @ 6:58 PM, November 28, 2005

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

 

Anonymous Andrew @ 9:27 AM, June 27, 2024

Hello mate great blog post

 


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