Checking Out the New Neighbours

Back before Christmas, as I was waiting for Scienceblogs to open its doors for me, I checked out the people already inside. Specifically, I wanted to know what sort of scientific backgrounds they had, and what their Technorati rankings were. How would I fit in? Was I a minor player?

In mid December, there were 51 blogs and one metablog on Scienceblogs. None of the bloggers had a main background in the humanities, unless perhaps we count creative writing for the science journalists. The most common scientific leaning by far was various flavours of biology (18 blogs), followed by neuroscience, science journalism and psychology. So I definitely have a chance to bring in new topics.

And the rankings? I'd been reading Pharyngula for more than a year and I knew P.Z.'s way up there in the Technorati top-500. In fact, links to him alone must be the main factor behind the high ranking for Scienceblogs.com. Salto sobrius, my old blog at Blogger.com, was ranked about 18000. Technorati is glitchy, so I could only get reasonable ranking figures for 44 of the blogs, ranging from about 1 to about 95000. The median ranking was about 17000 -- so my figure was actually pretty respectable! Actually, better than respectable, as I reached it without the aid of Scienceblogs...

Here are the top-10 Scienceblogs sorted per Technorati ranking rounded to the nearest thousand (status 22 December).