Monday, February 26, 2007

Few Thoughts on the Ranking of Blogs

Most blog ranking sites use the incoming links as an indicator of the success of a blog. I think this is wrong thinking.

If blogging was still just short snippets mentioning this article or that article then this would make sense. However more and more blogs are more like websites and have longer articles.

For example a blog such as Instapundit just mentions an article with one sentence about what the linked article/site/blog is talking about. That type of blogging is not about writing or sharing opinions.

My blog is more about writing and sharing my thoughts.

Therefore I reject the ranking numbers that are given to me based on the number of incoming links. Well I may just have some of those type of ranking services on my blog but I don't get excited about them or offended by them.

Another issue is the topics and the visitors. If I were to blog about popular topics like reality shows I'd get more visitors to my blog. I may not have regular readers and people may not actually read much of what I say. Also if I just mention something quickly it has the same weight as someone who puts one line of text down on a topic. Does that seem like apples to apples? It doesn't to me.

Blogging on a niche subject like homeschooling is not a way to have a blog with tons of hits. If my goal was lots of readers and a high number of hits I could be really wild with my opinions and blog about the hottest topics such as what so and so celebrity is doing in their life (no matter how stupid or shallow the topic may be).

Some think that the success of a blog is based on the number of comments that it gets. I find with certain types of homeschoolers, they don't like to share their opinions as they don't want to be criticized. On any given email chat list for homeschoolers only about 10% of the members/readers of the emails are regular contributors. Even smaller numbers actually post opinions. I have friends tell me they refuse to share opinions as they don't want to debate it, they are set in their ways and don't want any criticism from others about it (i.e. their choice to unschool, or the fact that their child doesn't know how to read at some age).

I also see on some blogs that the comments are completely stupid or not even interesting to read. Other comments are sometimes full of spam posts. Some of the comments are quite rude to boot.

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1 comment:

Dana said...

I agree. The blog ranking system is odd, even taken for the blogs it is intended to measure. Out of curiosity, I went through some of the top listed blogs on TTLB, and a lot of them were clearly ranked highly because they were members of every blogroll known to the blogosphere. Some of them have less traffic than I do (which isn't much).

That seems a bit artificial.