I naively would have never guessed that the blog post that with the most comments for “Off the Map” would be the recent blog ranking post. In hindsight it makes sense but I’m still a bit surprised at the can of worms it has opened. That said we really appreciate all the feedback and I think there is potential benefit in providing lists of relevant blogs and some sort of metric of how popular they are.

A quick recap of the feedback looks something like this. A lot of folks flat out said ranking blogs is stupid. Other said ranking blogs based on Technorati rankings is stupid. Some readers felt we were anglo-centric by only including blogs written in English. Lastly there were various issues with what was categorized as a GeoWeb blog and what was not.

I agree in part with all the criticisms except the first one. As a born and raised quantoid ranking things is what I do and often how I view the world (for better or worse). The idea that all things are equal and quantification is some how bad is just postmodern tomfoolery - in my highly biased opinion. If you can’t sort information meaningfully you end up with a morass of mediocrity and we might as well just hold hands and sing Kumbaya. That said there is good math and bad math.

Several folks did not like Technorati’s math. I naively figured that a company whose full time mission is ranking blogs would have something clever figured out, but apparently many folks think otherwise. Fair enough - I dug into how other people have gone about ranking blogs and found some diverging approaches to the task. Here is a quick recap of three distinct approaches to ranking blogs:

BallHype’s Sports Blog Ranking:

1. Number of links to a blog
2. The variety of links to a blog
3. No blog rolls
4. The more links a blog linking to you has the more weight it carries in the ranking (Google Page Rank natch).
5. Newer links are weighted higher than older links

The Talent Management Blog Power Rankings

1. Recruit a group of respected subject matter experts
2. Have bloggers submit their blog for review
3. Have the SME’s vote on the top 25 best blogs

Law Professor Blog Rankings

1. Citation Counts (number of academic publications)
2. SSRN Download Counts (number of publications downloaded)
3. Blog Traffic — Visitors and Page Views

All the other ranking I found were some derivation of these approaches. The first is the Google or Technorati approach of using incoming links to the blog with some sort of weighted algorithm to rank them. The second is like college football polls where experts vote on a ranking. The third is traffic based approach with some sort of subject specific authority weight added to it.

Each approach has its pros and cons, but I am curious which approach or combination of approaches people think would be most useful? I like the format Wikio has that shows the popularity of blogs moving up and down kind of like Netflix’s list of most popular movie.

I figure if we can come up with a good ranking approach readers are comfortable with we’ll be most of the way there. Categorization is really a case by case basis and will improve over time since it is inherently subjective. Including blogs of all languages was an inherently ethnocentric oversight we’ll fix that for the next go. In next month’s rankings we’ll shoot to use whatever approach appears most popular and logical to rate blogs.

Thanks again for the feedback positive and negative - keeps things interesting. I’ll close with this is all really in the spirit of fun and should not be taken terribly seriously. Think of it is as another way to interact with the community and learn about the many great blogs out there. I certainly learned about a lot of new blogs since the last post.

Is this possible or are we just herding cats?

Popularity: 22% [?]