British Blogs Top ‘N’

With all this fuss about the top British Blogs, I thought I may as well tell you what I know about it. mmChronic has suggested I use the referral traffic for the little BritBlog icons to give us an idea of what the popular British Blogs are. It’s not especially accurate, but it could be considered a rough guide I guess. And this method is really open to abuse, so I won’t be publishing the list based on this data again. However, I’m beginning to think of ways in which we could achieve more accurate results in the future. My main problem at the moment is server load (my web host for BritBlog shut me down last week for four hours), so what ever I do it needs to have very little impact on the server. That is until I can get a nice dedicated host

Anyway, here are the stats for the last few weeks:

Mon 21st to Sun 27th Feb

Mon 14th to Sun 20th Feb

Mon 7th to Sun 13th Feb

Phew, that was a task I should have scripted…..

Anyway, perhaps no surprises there. It should be pointed out that these blogs are blogs that link to BritBlog with one of the special icons. Not all referrals by these sites were icon requests - some may have been real people visiting BritBlog. Finally, some of these sites are the same blogs, they just omit the ‘www’ part of the URL.

I’ve been having a chat with mmChronic about ways to do this better, but if anyone has anything to add on the subject, please let me know.

Sociable:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 at 11:05 pm and is filed under BritBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

9 Responses to “British Blogs Top ‘N’”

marky moo
March 2nd, 2005 13:22
1

Another problem with these stats is that some blogs just have the icon on the homepage, others have the icon on every post.

To do a correct analysis of readership, the icon should be present on every page (post pages, home page, category pages etc.). But hey, it’s all good publicity for BritBlog
marky moo
March 2nd, 2005 15:14
2

Hmm, and it’s looking like results by region would be a good feature too…
mmChronic
March 2nd, 2005 17:32
3

Regional charts would be excellent - and give even more blogs some time in the limelight.

Our BritBlog button is part of our template and is on every page anyway.
marky moo
March 2nd, 2005 23:14
4

Well I think the tags/buttons should be on every page, as we should take into account the deeper site traffic.

I’ve had some chats with folk this afternoon, and this is what I’m currently thinking:

People put the following on their pages:

<a href="http://www.britblog.com/"> <img src="http://www.britblog.com/images/icons/some-icon.gif?uid=123" /> </a>

The uid parameter is the member’s ID, and the icon is actually a script that returns the image with cache-unfriendly headers.

So far, so good.

When this image is requested, the client IP address will be logged in the server access logs, along with the referring URL (the blog page that is being viewed), and the date/time of the event.

I can process this file nightly/weekly and pull out all these lines and do the counting. Multiple entires for an ‘IP address/blog page URL’ combination within one hour will only be considered as one impression. This way multiple requests from the same reader on the same page within one hour can be discounted. It also makes it harder for people to trick the counting. The most anyone can easily spoof will be 24 impressions a day, which will be quite insignificant.

Any comments?
Gordon
March 3rd, 2005 00:04
5

That sounds like a much more accurate way of tracking stats for sites listed in BritBlog.

(ohh and hi! hope you don’t mind me crashing on in here!)
marky moo
March 3rd, 2005 00:22
6

Not at all - welcome to the exciting world that is my blog

I think I’ve got a neat solution for processing the data offsite now too. So we’re getting there. Hope to have something usable in the next couple of days now…
mmChronic
March 3rd, 2005 08:15
7

Sounds excellent Mark!

I like that deep pages are being counted - many people were arguing for front page only - but we’ve written lots of stuff that is well linked and visited often (like this - even Blogger linked this one!) and they are valid visitors in my book.

I also like the fact there is a margin for repeat visits during the day (without the opportunity to abuse it) as we update quite a bit (as you’ve seen the last couple of days! so repeat visits are a must for New Links readers.
Convict
March 3rd, 2005 10:42
8

I’ve just joined BritBlog and think that this is a great idea, especially using the id for the image.
marky moo
March 3rd, 2005 20:03
9

OK, full steam ahead!
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