Ranking Canada’s “Top” 25 Political Blogs
January 6, 2009 by Dirk
After reading Werner Patel’s ridicule of Robert Jago’s,’Canada’s Top 25 Political Blogs’, I had to chuckle.
Werner writes…
Following Robert Jago’s joke list of top political blogs (he pre-selects his favourite blogs and then ranks them based on dubious criteria)
If I used Jago’s approach, Small Dead Animals or Ezra Levant wouldn’t show on any of my lists. After all, quantity (site traffic) does not equal quality, and since neither of these two blogs have any discernible quality, you won’t find them on my blogroll,…
He than states…
The lesson to be drawn from this exercise is that there is no valid blog ranking out there. Unfortunately, there is no company that has developed a professional and reliable measuring methodology (e.g., as they do with newspapers’ circulation numbers, TV ratings, etc.).
Therefore, forget all those pseudo-rankings – they mean diddly-squat, all of them. You, the reader, must browse and choose the blogs you like. Once you have found them, bookmark them and enjoy their posts.
If Werner had just stopped there he would be basically correct,but he does not.Werner then goes on to produce two list(so called”real lists”),and surprise surprise his blog appears on both. This after he just finished stating that blog ranking is inconsistent and meaningless.
Still, if one had to choose, the objective rankings produced by search engines are definitely preferable to any selection a blogger makes based on his own ideas.
Making it’s quite obvious that the point Werner is really trying to make, is that if his blog is not on the list,then that list must be flawed or a “joke”.
Werner generates his first list using Technorati ,the criteria used he does not say.The second list he generates using Google …
this ranking is 100% objective, based on something as simple as a Google search of “Canada + Political blogs” – i.e. no manual selection of blogs, as Jago does, and no other subjective weighting or ranking on the author’s part (aggregators have been excluded from search results, as have any search results that clearly do not deal with politics as their main topic):
Are we to believe that Werner’s blog makes both lists,17th and 15th,while SDA,yuk,a blog that receives upwards of 10,000 hits daily appears on neither ? Are we to believe that Werner’s blog out ranks Calgary Grit,Inkless Wells,Canadian Cynic,or Dawg’s etc etc ?….of course not.
Anyway out of curiosity I did a list of my own, based simply on the number of incoming links that a particular blog receives.For sure it is not definitive,but it is definitly more relevant than Werner’s lists.In fact the list that Werner condemns, Jargo’s , lists many of the same blogs as my list.
All arguments aside,in the end its traffic that counts.
The more popular a blog the more hits and links that blog will receive.A premise that could be easily proven if bloggers made their site metrics(i.e Google Analytic’s,Sitemeter etc) public.There’s your way out Werner,prove is in the pudding.
Anyway without further interuption,“Canada’s Top 25 political blogs”, as per number of incoming links…
1.The Oil Drum 8,740 12,000-13,000 hits/visits per day
2.The Reaction 6,010
3.DeSmog Blog , Steyn On-line both with 5,150
4.Colby Cosh 4,960
5.SDA 4,940 8,000-10,000 hit/visits per day
6.Micheal Geist 4,220
7.Damnation 3,700
8.Five Feet of Fury 3,420
9.Shotgun Blog 3,310
10.Steve Janke 2,820
11.Ghost of a Flea 2,530
12.Ezera Levant 2,500
13.POGGE 2,410
14.Dust My Broom 2,230
15.Galloping Beaver 2,060
16. No-Libs 2040 , Warren Kinsella 1,930
17.Vanity Press 1,800
18.BeneDiction 1,620
19.Inkless Wells 1,510
20.Calgary Grit 1,490
21.Kamangir 1,440
22.Miss 604 , James Bow both with 1,410
23.Jordan Cooper 1,380
24.Canadian Cynic 1,360
25.Dr Dawg , Cathie from Canada , Bastard Logic all with 1,330
followed by Stage Left -1,180 Matthew Good -1,170 Abandoned Stuff -1,150 Liberal Catnip -1,130 Antonia Zerbisias -946
and way,way,wayyyyy down [tied with me ouch] we find Werner Patel – 250
For those interested in blog metrics/ranking,everything you could possaible need to know can be found & discussed here
I’m not really sure basing a Top Blogs list based on incoming links is really accurate either. As you say, I think site traffic and hits/unique visitors per day have to be taken into account. Ironically, I made Jago’s Top 25 list in September, but then havent been on it since, even when during the election and the prorogue stuff going on, my site traffic and hits nearly tripled to what I had in September.
That said, it’s no skin off of my nose that I wasn’t on the Top 25 list… it’s more or less an ego thing to be on it – nothing more.
Fascinating. Thank you for this. I expect many people do not realize how much work this must have been to put together.
I’m only posting this so I can have one more link back to my blog.
There’s a lot of ways to skin a cat
err blog ranking.
off of my nose that I wasn’t on the Top 25 list… it’s more or less an ego thing to be on it – nothing more”…..
I totally agree Scott
Dino said…”There’s a lot of ways to skin a cat
err blog ranking”….
again I totally agreed,but there to traffic is still the best indicator of popularity(not quality for sure).And as I said its very easy to find which Cnd blog’s are more popular simply by blogger’s making their site meters public,but most don’t. I don’t either,although once I hit a respectable number say 200-300 hits daily I will,but until then I don’t real want to flaunt my “irrelevance”
Dirk: You are quoting Dinosaur, not Flea.
Correction made and thanks for your earlier kind remarks
Scott – it’s a moving target. I got kicked off the list this month too.
For the raw links thing you have… Google PR measures something similar, though it doesn’t treat all links equally. I went to a seminar on this a while back – a work thing. It’s from that work thing, by the way, that I reverse engineered the method used on the TTLB Ecosystem (though mine is modified because I don’t feel like putting that much work into this).
So, as I was saying, not all links are created equal. If I get a link from the BBC, that’s worth more than a link from some message board. If I get a link today, it’s worth more than a link I got 6 months ago. If I get a link from a site with only 3 or 4 links out, it’s worth more than a hit from a “links farm” that has thousands of sites linked out from it.
Put these things together and you get page rank. That’s one of the factors I measure. So it’s the same concept as what you have up there on your list, but a bit more refined.
Now what that other guy did? Doing a random web search and selecting the first 25 results? That’s poorly reasoned and betrays ignorance of how the “interweb” functions. I’m just ignoring that. That guy’s main beefs with me, his main stated ones are – a: his site gets 5,000 hits a day, so he should be ranked at the top of the list – and b: I discriminate and only select sites I like for the list.
Here’s the answer to that –
A: I see no evidence of that traffic (And I’d be curious to see the bounce rate on what paltry traffic he does con into his site).
B: I freaking hate Canadian Cynic, in fact I’d love to see that site dropped from the list. But facts are facts, people read that ass of a blog and it makes the list every month. Not enough people are reading my site at the moment, so it got dropped this month. Facts etc … If I were cooking the results, my site would be on the list, and CC would not.
Jargo said…”I see no evidence of that traffic (And I’d be curious to see the bounce rate on what paltry traffic he does con into his site)”…
my point also,but all said ranking is an imprecise science at best,the results can vary(hugely) depending on criteria used.
Therefore (I believe) the best indicator of popularity(which can be used to “rank”)is traffic.Traffic is what all blogger’s want,in the blogging game a wide audience(in most part) is the goal otherwise whats the point.
Some get more than others,Werner is definitly not one of the “big dogs”,but then again neither am I as is the case with the majority of blogs/bloggers.Does that make some blog better,of course not.Ranking traffic comparisons etc etc are mostly about ego,indeed blogger’s love lists ,blogger’s love to know how their traffic compares with other blogs.Unfortunately the comparing part is subjective at best.The best a blogger can do is make one’s traffic info public,and hope other blogger’s do the same.
Because we all know in the end it’s about the traffic.
[...] in a further blow to my massive WWW-ego, I finished out of the top 25 in this [...]
Dirk wrote:
“Are we to believe that Werner’s blog makes both lists,17th and 15th,while SDA,yuk,a blog that receives upwards of 10,000 hits daily appears on neither ?”
Which one?
Of Mr. Patels’ multiply disordered personal blogs I mean.
.
now,now Ross