j's scratchpad

Feedster now has a top 500 list for popular bloggers. There are some nice surprises on the list, as well as some reaffirmed A listers.

I especially like that Feedster makes a graphic their top 500 bloggers can disply on their blog.

I didn’t see any of my 30 (or is it 30+ blogs now?) there. What a relief!

For more, check out Scott, Scott, or the press release.

A few items worth noting from the second Scott and some comments as requested:

"Except for one notable exception, if you don’t have your own domain or subdomain … , then you were excluded from the list."

As someone who only works on hosted blogs, I find this discouraging. It’s like saying hosted blogs are somehow lesser than other blogs, which I don’t understand. Many of the blogs I read are on hosted services. I find their information just as valuable as information from someone’s domain name. So what’s going on with this?

Is hosting important to the current algorithm? Is it easier to cull inbound links to a single domain than, say, sort through all the links to blogs.law.harvard.edu to figure out to which specific blog they go?

This list’s criteria:

"It is a ranking of the blogs with the most inbound links over time, however only blogs with posts in the last seven days were included.

• What other algorithm(s) would be better?

• How often should we update the list? ScottJ points out our current intent in today’s press release, ‘We’re planning to refresh the FEEDSTER Top 500 each month and will keep its ranking methodology fluid. As the blog world is rapidly changing, we must quickly update our ranking methods….’"

I think the idea of changing the list based on different criteria is cool. One of the ideas I have is that there are different A lists for things like hobbies, professions, humor, politics, etc. I’d be interested in knowing, say, who the top librarian (go fig, right?) blogs are or what are the top blogs librarians read (which is far more difficult to gather, I imagine). (No, it’s not just so I can see if I turn up on the lists. Think about your profession and how you keep current with it. Would it be helpful for you to know which of your professional colleagues who write are popular? Is it useful to know what many of them read?)

Something for me to ruminate on for a while.

Addendum 8/17: Scott Rafer has been responding to many comments about Feedster’s list on his weblog, including a much better explanation of hosting and the algorithm. The original passage made it sound like they were ignoring hosted blogs. Blogs buried deep in directories were excluded. Many hosted blogs were considered for the list.

I agree with Alfred that it’s great that the Feedster folks interact with us bloggers over comments about Feedster.

I’m not surprised the scratchpad isn’t on the list. This weblog isn’t /that/ popular. I only have about 4400 subscribers. (The number is decreasing again.) That doesn’t compare with anyone on the list, especially knittyBlog or Stuff on My Cat. After all, this blog has nothing to do with knitting or cats. Why would anyone read it?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2005 at 2:24 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.