You know, i am out of touch these days in what is happening in blogging. Once upon a time i followed every little piece of news and i would have known that Dipping into the Blogpond has done the hard work to compile a list of the Top 100 Australian blogs. The rankings were determined by the rankings of Australian blogs on Technorati and I believe will be updated regularly.
I for one am pleased to find that the list has been created, the more exposure and the easier it is to find other Aussie bloggers, the better in my opinion. But it seems that all are not as happy with it and it even got to the mainstream press with The Age publishing about it in Australia logs on and blogs on and on and on including criticism of the methodogy using the technorati rankings and Alexa ratings. The method has in turn lead to some sour grapes being posted around the place.
I spent some time as i was doing other things pondering how things could be done better and decided there is no definite answer. Technorati is a problem because it relies (i believe) on the bloggers being registered there in order to have a ranking which i expect would mean that certain blogging areas may be excluded as the average user of the particular service may not be aware that it even exists like livejournal or myspace for instance. Similarly Alexa is a problem as it can only estimate traffic and depends on people having an Alexa enabled toolbar installed which will obviously miss a lot of users.
My opinion. Yes it will miss some, yes some may be over and under inflated but at the end of the day there needs to be a consistant way of doing things and although there will be problems, in any method there will be problems. Good luck to them i say.
5 Comments Received
April 24th, 2007 @8:45 am
I suppose you can’t really define popular. There may be a blog out there that only gets 100 visitors a week yet changes peoples lives in a considerable way for the better, yet another blog gets thousands of visitors talking about trivial crap.
Out of those two, I know which one I would choose as being more important and is deserving of more exposure!
April 24th, 2007 @1:29 pm
Hi Greg
Many thanks for your encouraging comments. As you say, the point is that it’s more about the exposure and making the blogs easier to find. It’s a pure numbers exercise and as Pete rightfully comments the list does not necessarily reflect the quality of the blogs. Then again who measures “quality” or “importance”? What interests one doesn’t necessarily interest another – it’s all subjective. And around we go.
April 24th, 2007 @2:26 pm
Pete, i agree with you totally as good is in the eye of the beholder. Best we can do is try to find them using a consistent set of standards (like Technorati) and hopefully a few more of the more inspirational blogs might get up there soon if enough of us can find them and link to them
Meg – glad to be an encouraging comment! The best we can do is have the consistent basis to determine the highest rating blogs and go from there. But your right,, we can go around and around on this one !
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