Top of the British Blogs - Ideas
The Top of the BritBlogs Charts have been running for a little while now, and on the whole the feedback has been positive.
As I have said, once our new server arrives (wondering where it is - must call the web host tomorrow. Can they do anything right?) I plan on storing all the results for the charts on a daily basis. At the moment I load up the top and bottom 20 blogs, and only display the top and bottom 10 blogs. This gives me a buffer in case any of the chart members become inactive members and get pulled from the charts.
Another thing that I don’t seem to be able to make clear is that the charts are not a traffic count! We do not pretend to do the work that a third party site traffic meter does, and we even apply limits on what we consider to be a ‘read’. The important thing about the charts is that all the member sites are measured in the same way.
Anyway, the following is a list of things I plan on doing to the charts in due course. Your comments are invited, and I will try to ensure that these meet the general approval of any interested parties.
- Remove numbers (score) from the charts.
- I think these confuse the issue, as people think that the number is a direct representation of traffic/page impressions. It is not.
- Offset the Bottom 10 Blogs by a small amount.
- We’re getting the same blogs in the bottom charts each day, and usually this is because the tracking image hasn’t been implemented correctly by the blogger. (The other reason is that some of these blogs may be dreadfully dull, but I can’t comment on that).
The goal of the bottom charts is to promote the less popular blogs - that doesn’t mean they have to be the least popular blogs in the chart. By showing blogs that aren’t quite in the bottom 10, we encourage members to try and generate some traffic themselves (by leaving comments on other sites, for example) and with luck, the blogs we list will change a bit more regularly.
I have also discovered one or two sites abusing the system by forging only one request a day in order to get the link from BritBlog. Not good.
- Ranking all blogs that take part in the charts
- Several people have asked if we can do this, and once I store all the result data this will be something we can do. If you are currently number 11 for example, you have no idea that you just missed the top 10! I plan on listing your current rank on your individual blog profile page.
- Monthly roundups
- Once I am storing all the daily results, I can do monthly summaries of the results to provide a better overview of what is going on in the British Blog World. I’ve thought about weekly roundups too, but this may just be overkill.
That’s all for the mean time - not so much to do, but I’d appreciate feedback before I do the work!
RSS Feed for posts
April 13th, 2005 21:56
I agree about offsetting the bottom of the blogs. It seems that the reason a number of the lowest 10 aren’t getting any hits is because they haven’t been updated at all recently. By focusing more on the blogs which already get some, but not a huge amount of, traffic daily you’re going to get a better selection?
So basically I’m just agreeing with you. I’ll shut up now.
April 13th, 2005 22:31
Thanks Clair, glad someone agrees!
April 13th, 2005 23:08
How about measuring and showing the average over a period of time - e.g. a week - rather than just basing it on daily figures? It would make the chart changing more of an event and mean you’d soften out large spikes in traffic which aren’t representative of overall traffic.
Just my 2 pennies - thanks for doing this by the way!
April 13th, 2005 23:51
Robin, do you mean a rolling daily average for the last seven days? I agree this would certainly smooth out spikes!
Just thinking aloud here, it would mean new blogs would need to wait seven days before any real results could be calculated. This probably isn’t a good thing. Further, don’t you think it’s interesting to see daily spikes? Sometimes folk will bung something on their site that appeals to a load of others, and their traffic will spike. I don’t think we should try and hide these events.
Having said all that, it could provide an interesting view on the data. Thanks for the suggestion!
April 14th, 2005 08:54
I think you should leave the score but clarify how it’s calculated. Ideally everyone would have access to their score. Publishing scores gives people an idea of what it takes to get in the chart and lets them know if they’re just bubbling under.
I agree that a weekly chart would be better than a daily chart. It won’t make a difference to chart positions if the score is a seven day average or a seven day total.
Why just a top ten? Ten’s a small number and many people will have reasonable traffic, but knowing a top ten position’s a tall order won’t bother. A top 100 would make a chart position relatively attainable and so attract more participants.
Charts for Scotland, Wales, NI, the ex-pats and the English regions would be good; the more prizes you give out (and the easier it is to get some sort of ranking) the more people will join in.
And thanks again for all your work — may your ad revenues rise enough to make it worthwhile.
April 14th, 2005 09:33
Top 100 sounds like a good idea to me as well.
How about a tracker graphic that can go into RSS feeds? If your blog doesn’t have an RSS feed then it would appear that you get more traffic than a site that gets most of it’s readers via RSS. There are plenty of RSS readers that use a browser to display the feed, so a tracking graphic should work like the page graphic you use at the moment.
Perhaps the ‘Bottom 10′ should only be included if there has been an update in the last week, although that will be harder to track it would at least remove from the list ‘dead blogs’.
Actually, it’d be a nice way to remove dead blogs automatically from the list (otherwise the database will just keep growing full of orphaned blogs).
Just my tuppence worth…
April 14th, 2005 11:17
Stephen, thanks for the input. I’m still reluctant to carry on publishing scores due to the differences between all the real site traffic meters and our meter, but if each member can see their rank (via their public profile) then that should tell them how far they have got to go to get in the top x.
Regional scores would be an interesting feature too - thanks. I’ll look into the possibilities there. Re. the ad revenues, they’re struggling at the moment!
Tom, I think a larger Top X chart is the way forward! The RSS feed tracker would only work with HTML compatible readers, and may be a bit quirky. It’s an interesting idea though, and I shall look into it.
I am working with perlworld to build a bot to keep an eye on all member sites. Among other things, we are hoping that we can detect when blogs were last updated, and hence detect real dead blogs. Do you think this is a better solution?
April 14th, 2005 20:38
Detecting ‘dead blogs’ will open up the way to much better metrics, consider it as the first ‘filter’ that you need to pass before being included in the chart.
I should imagine that most folks realise that different counters give different readings, I’ve got two trackers (for a giggle) and my hosting stats, and they are all different.
I figure that an RSS tracker, while only picking up the HTML browser types, would still give the same percentage across the board of all the blogs. But then I don’t have the foggiest idea how to alter my RSS feed anyway…
April 15th, 2005 09:49
I’m agree it should be top 100 (or even top 1000), not top 10
Rather than a seven day rolling average, I actually meant picking a “chart day” (Sunday? - like the chart show on radio one) to generate some buzz - once a week the chart would change and people would talk about it as it was an event.
I do take your point about spikes being meaningful and interesting tho.
How about also displaying other data as well as their chart position - the traffic figures from your counter are relevant as they show how close blogs are to each other (or not), even if the it’s not consitant with other counters - but how about things like their technorati link data? (Technorati have an API) - you could then rank british blogs by other criteria as well as traffic (which may actually be more meaningful).
April 15th, 2005 18:40
Mmm, lots of ideas! OK, I think the idea of a weekly chart would good. I’m having some ideas that involve the daily chart showing not the popular blogs, but showing the blogs that have large changes in traffic all of a sudden. Bah, there are to many possibilities!
So maybe I should just start with a weekly Top 100, or maybe a Top 50, and a list of 50 blogs that aren’t ‘dead’ but that are near the bottom of the poll.
This would hopefully generate a weekly buzz or something like that. In addition, I can publish individual blog ranks in the blog profiles - again theses would be updated weekly with the charts.
Monthly roundups may still be interesting too, as would regional charts.
I’ve also been thinking about ways for members to vote for other blogs. I usually see this as a pointless exercise, but it is something that has been requested. I could include in this a method for people to easily report inappropriate members.
I’ve got a load of new features (not related to the charts) that I want to do, so perhaps I’ll make a post about these in a week or so.
Just got to find some spare time now…
August 13th, 2005 13:35
I think it would be more productive to do a weekly instead of daily chart, as it would be more apparent when it changes if you get what I mean.
I got a comment saying I’m at the bottom of the chart regularly, I’ve started updating my blog again so hopefully it will lift a bit, sorry if I enraged anyone with my inactivity, had a few computer problems.
I found it ironic that when I came back and discovered the stuation, the sites changing servers, so there’s no chart for a few days, therefore I can’t see if what I’ve done so far is having any effect. Not complaining, it’s just my luck that’s all.