Finding the A-List Bloggers

Technorati

Technorati's list of the most influential bloggers has many more relevant entries than Pubsub. Its primary criterion is the same as PubSub: the number of sites that link to a particular site. The top sites on PubSub's in-link list approach 2,000 links for the top 10; on Technorati, they are all above 8,000 links.

By checking more relevant sites, Technorati does seem to capture the buzz better than Google or Alexa. Technorati is clearly better than PubSub in terms of analyzing in-link lists, although they still have some less-than-relevant entries such as Yahoo! Messenger on the list. Web developer and blogger Jason Kottke also says that Technoratihas trouble counting links . A post of his received 159 trackbacks, but Technorati only listed it as having 93 sites linking to it.

Bloglines

Top 5 Sites by Subscription

www.bloglines.com

www.wired.com

www.dilbert.com

www.boingboing.net

www.engadget.com

Bloglines takes a different approach by looking at feed subscribers instead of links to a given web site. Their list looks like a good mix of PubSub and Technorati. It has sites such as BoingBoing, Gizmodo, and Engadget, which also appear on Technorati's list, as well as the New York Times and BBC, which show up on PubSub. Bloglines also provides a simple description beneath each link, which helps you to scan a list of bloggers very rapidly.

The Bloglines system has a clear advantage over both of the other lists in that it is an "opt-in" list. The advantage of using feeds is that it more accurately measures the interests of the average blog reader (who doesn't have an active blog), as opposed to the opinions of fellow influencers (who run blogs that can carry link weight). Bloglines is comparable to using TV's Nielsen Ratings to evaluate a show's popularity, as opposed to asking the PBS commentators what TV shows they most like. Of course, the downside is that the number of subscribing feeds is very susceptible to manipulation.

Feedster

Feedster provides both an RSS feed aggregator as well as a search tool. They maintain two different top lists which use different analytic techniques: the Feedster Top 500 and the Feedster Top 100. The Feedster Top 500 is much like the in-link lists that Technorati and PubSub have. We're assuming (they don't say) that the in-links counted by the Feedster Top 500 are taken from individual blog posts. This puts the top five sites at well over 20,000 links each; it takes 809 links to make the top 500 list. While the Top 500 is similar to the sites we've already discussed, the Top 100 is more useful. The Feedster Top 100 is like Bloglines; it looks at feed subscriptions to form its list. BoingBoing makes this top five, yet again. Otherwise, we see different sites but ones that we would expect to make the top five: Wired, Slashdot, and Dilbert. We're not sure how the Google Weblog ended up on this list; it's much too special-interest to attract numbers comparable to Dilbert.

IceRocket

The next site we looked at was IceRocket, backed by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. It doesn't have a list of the top bloggers, but it is a useful resource. At IceRocket, you can search for blog posts by topic or by URL (i.e., find out who is linking to it). This way, you can also compare trends for certain topics to see how who is blogging about what over about a two-month period.

Link tracking is another useful tool provided by IceRocket. They provide a service that lets bloggers track the links to their own posts with a short line of code. This can also be done through the search feature by entering a URL. The aforementioned post by Jason Kottke comes up with 59 sites linking to it. You can really see whose posts are creating buzz around the internet, although Memeorandum, a news summary aggregator drawing from experts and pundits, insiders and outsiders, media professionals and amateur bloggers every 5 minutes, is a simpler one-stop solution to do that.