Apparently some computer geeks at Carnegie Mellon came up with a complicated mathematical formula to decide which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere?
Bloggersblog comments.
OK, the fact that Don Surber is #2 is not too way off mark (surely in the top 100, if not exactly #2). Scienceblogs.com is in the 98th spot and should be way higher, I think.
But what is Instapudding doing in the Top Spot? If you want disinformation, sure. Likewise for Michelle Malkin, Captains Quarters and Powerline. And how useful it is to read a dead blog - my old blog ranked #3? How useful it is to rank blogs according to the 2006 data - that is eons ago in Internet time?
This must have been some fuzzy math. I hope the blogosphere responds with a big laugh.
Technology
Comments
Why is all of ScienceBlogs treated as a single blog? That doesn't seem right to me.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | October 25, 2007 10:17 AM
I agree 100%.
Posted by: Coturnix | October 25, 2007 10:19 AM
It's not a very sophisticated formula, but it's not a bad concept for 2006. The blogs that do well are those that are (were) most connected, with lots of incoming/outgoing links. So if you're a good writer but don't do a lot of linking, you won't do well on this scale. I guess it's trying to be a little more sophisticated than technorati, by measuring both incoming and outgoing links.
Posted by: Dave Munger | October 25, 2007 10:44 AM
Obviously this is a poorly researched list, where is Daily Kos? And MetaFilter at 33 and Guy Kawasaki at 38?? Come on. No credence for this research.
And why the hatin' on Glenn Reynolds? Do you read Instapundit or are you just repeating what you've been told? He's great. Yes a little right of center (no problem for me as I am too) but he is also all over the place with his content. It's like the stumble-upon toolbar had a webpage.
And he posts like crazy. 15-20 posts a day.
Posted by: Greg O'Byrne | October 25, 2007 12:33 PM
Ahh I should have looked at the source...this is for 2006 ergo the reason your old blog was included.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/blogs/blogs-uc-pa.html
Top 100 blogs for unit cost case and PA objective function
* PA score : score for the solution of length k
* NP : number of posts of a blog in 2006
* IL : number of inlinks that a blog got from other blogs inside the dataset in 2006
* OLO : number of outlinks to other blogs in the dataset
* OLA : number of all outlinks (also counting links other resources on the web)
Posted by: Greg O'Byrne | October 25, 2007 12:35 PM
This obviously favors bloggers who act as filters as opposed to those who provide actual content. And Glenn favourably links to all the RightWing douchebags so his high rank and high traffic are dangerous in a sense - people actually listen to him.
Posted by: Coturnix | October 25, 2007 12:43 PM
So if you're a good writer but don't do a lot of linking, you won't do well on this scale...
This obviously favors bloggers who act as filters as opposed to those who provide actual content.
Note that this in a sense explains scienceblogs' low ranking-- because sciencebloggers mostly link each other more than they link to or are linked by external sources. If each ScienceBlog was counted separately, many of the individual ScienceBlogs would likely have scores much higher than the ScienceBlogs collective received in this analysis!
In general this analysis seems to deal poorly with, so to speak, "cliques"-- say, a set of blogs which link each other heavily, but do not link blogs outside the clique very often. You can look at one of these cliques as being a closed collective like scienceblogs, only spread out across multiple sites-- in many cases reading a series of blogs from this clique will make you little more "up-to-date" than just reading one. But each one of the blogs in the clique will individually have its numbers inflated by the repetition of everyone else's stories within the clique. Though if on the other hand the clique does what scienceblogs does and group more than one related blog or writer under a single domain, as noted the numbers will be artificially deflated because even when legitimate new content is generated, all the most interested people spreading the news will technically count as the same blog!
Posted by: Coin | October 25, 2007 4:59 PM