Indiana’s Best Blogs

The Blogmeister would like to thank HoosierAccess (and give a big tip ‘o the hat) for bringing the voting over at Howey’s Political Blog to his attention.  Apparently Howey decided to run a poll asking readers to vote on the best political blog in Indiana.  However, the poll only includes about 5 blogs and a choice for “other” (“other” was winning at the time of this posting…good).  Hoosier Access raises some good points about the poll, which I shall not address here, but encourage the reader to click over to the original post on that site.

However, this poll raises some interesting questions I’ve been thinking about since I started this blog.  First, how does one tell how any particular blog is doing relative to the other blogs out there?  Blognetnews gives some assistance as they carry posts from all the blogs they monitor, show “most” comments, clicks, and links.  They also post “the most influential blogs” of the week, based on some proprietary formula.  They also allow readers to rate posts, which, in turn, rate the blog.  (As an aside, I have problems with their rating system.  They only show how the blog is rated, not how the individual posts are rated, making it hard for a blogger to improve individual posts in the future).  So this is one way to rate blogs, but it seems they measure more short term (one week) results, which can be subject to whims and temporary popularity, as even bad bloggers may write a good post now and then.

It seems a better measure of how good a blog is can be found at Blogjuice.  This site, which by the way, provides this service to sell advertising, measures four indices to give a blog an overall rank.  For brevity I will not go into their formula, because they explain it well on the site, but it includes how many feeds a blog has, it’s alexa score, the technorati score, and then number of links to the blog.  None of these are easily manipulated by the blogger, and are much less susceptible to momentary spikes in a blog’s popularity.  The drawback is a blog must be well established, in internet terms, to begin to gather the rankings on the specific indices.  However, I would maintain that if a blog is good, it will gather them quickly. 

I took the top 20 blogs from Blognetnews and ran them through Blogjuice.  On Blogjuice, the blog is given a score of 0-10 with 10 being the best.  Here are the results, with the Blognetnews rank following the name:

4.4 Bilerico Project 8

2.9 Blue Indiana 15

2.7 Fort Wayne Observed 5

2.5 Taking Down Words 14

2.3 Angry White Boy 9

1.8 Masson’s Blog 7

1.8 Hoosier Access 3

1.7 Indiana Law Blog 2

1.4 Ruth Holladay 16

1.3 Berry Street Beacon 17

1.2 Indiana Systemic Thinking 4

1.2 Opening Arguments 1

1.2 Region Life 12 

1.2 Masson’s Blog 7

1.1 Advance Indiana 6

1.0 Indiana Barrister 11

1.0 Hoosier Pundit 10

0.8 Kenn Gividen’s Indiana News 19

0.5 Blue County Red State 20

0.5 Veritas Rex 13

0.1 Digital Farmers Blog 18

So what does all this mean?  Well to me, it means Blogjuice is an indicator of how well a blog does over time, while Blognetnews shows more of a snapshot of what is going on right now.  So, which is better?  I don’t know and think knowing what is hot now could be just as important as what has done well over time.  For a beginning blogger it would be nice to know how your doing now and as your blog matures you could be more interested in how it is doing over time.  For readers, something doing well now could mean it really is good and will do well over time, while a more established blog is likely to have a devoted readership and more comments and interaction.

Still, does any of this really matter?  Unless your trying to justify how popular your blog is to an advertiser, or you have some competition issues, I really don’t think so.  Shouldn’t one write a blog because they like to?  I read somewhere most blogs have a readership of 1, so anything above that would be a success, in my opinion.  In addition, if you read things just because everyone else does, have fun in the herd.  You really may be missing something only you and one other person like.  Really, isn’t that what it’s all about, collecting your own list of interesting reading, not someone else’s?