What makes a good blog?
This post is related to my earlier one about the technoranki peer group, but it’s probably healthy to get input from as wide a range of people as possible.
It may be better to phrase that question as “What measurable factors can be used to identify a good blog?“, and although that’s a bit of a mouthful, it’s important to bear the measurable bit in mind.
For example, is it purely a weblog’s traffic? Should it be unique readers? The number of inbound links from other blogs? Download speed (i.e. user experience)? What about the quality of the HTML or CSS? And don’t forget all the other sources of information out on the internet about a given URL (like the Alexa score).
There are lot’s of possible factors; some are more important than others. So in advance of the peer group forming it would be interesting to hear other people’s ideas on this topic. Feel free to chip in!
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November 27th, 2006 12:31
I think site stats (uniques) should be a large factor in determining the position but other factors would be required such as number of inbound links, Google PageRank, Technorati ranking, Alexa score, the number of links with social bookmarking sites like Delicious, number of pages within Google, Yahoo, etc.
I think factors such as quality of the site and download speed shouldn’t be a factor as bloggers may be using blogging tools that may produce large pages or invalid code.
November 27th, 2006 18:14
Thanks for your input Rob.
November 28th, 2006 16:43
I agree with Robert that the sites themselves (download speed, design, etc.) shouldn’t be assessed: the measures of links and visits mean that other bloggers and blog readers are doing that assessment for you when they choose to link to or read a blog.
One problem with hit counting is that it misses feed readers. You could count Bloglines subscriptions, but that would limit to one reader, or Feedburner stats, but that only works for Feedburner feeds (and may be private?).
November 28th, 2006 19:36
Subscribers to feeds are a problem Will, yes. I’ve thought about the FeedBurner API and maybe Bloglines, but as you pointed out: not everyone uses them so it wouldn’t be fair.
I was thinking that it may be fair to assume that most blogs will all have about the same percentage of readers that consume a feed compared to those that visit the blog directly. This would mean the actual number of subscribers is irrelevant as we would only need to know relative blog traffic levels. However looking at some of my own results I can see this isn’t the case:
Using yesterday as a sample, FeedBurner tells me that BritBlog has five to six times the number of feed subscribers than my own blog. However, according to StatCounter, my own blog had just over twice the number of page impressions than the BritBlog blog had.
So I wonder what the answer is?
One option may be to get people to add some kind of tracker to their RSS feeds, embedded in each feed item. Do you think people would take this up? The benefit is that it gives us a much better view of readership levels, but the downside clearly is that it is more of a pain for Technoranki members to implement.
Any opinions anyone?
November 29th, 2006 13:16
A good blog is one which the writer enjoys creating. Although it is always good to have comments and link to others. As a very new blogger it seems to me to be an interesting network out there…..
November 29th, 2006 18:05
What makes a good blog? I think the answer is something akin to the number of views you will get on any subject. However, having said that I will attempt to throw something concrete in the mix:
1. BLOGS ARE HARD TO CATEGORISE
One difficulty is the sheer RANGE of what constitutes a blog: some are serious writing, some personal stories, some collections of links, some collections of images, some a merge of many things. My own blog tends to be more essay style pieces on the whole: and its a mix of political and personal stuff all from a Buddhist perspective.
2. QUALITY OF WRITING
Good writing is important. Readability scores are something I have never seen in a blog ranking but there are good mathematical reading score systems that could be employed. Fleish-Kincade or something like that. Simple, well written English (or anylanguage) makes for a better blog, in my humble opinion.
3. SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS
Search engine rankings are very hard to employ because so many variables in the way the blog is constructed matter here. My blog tends to feature very highly at google and the other search engines because I use well constructed Meta Tags, Keywords on every page and a few other tricks. This means i may come out ahead of someone whose blog is better written and better constructed but less well optimised.
4. LINKS
Inbound links are not counted accurately by anyone as far as I can see. Google, technorati and all the others miss links: I need to trawl serveral places to find all the people linking to me. Outbound links and inbound links can be farmed to create the impression of a connectivity that is not real. A good blog will be linked to by other relevant blogs and sites and will link to the same kind of site.
5. FREQUENCY OF POSTING
Someone can post a lot and say little or post a little and say a lot. One blog I read recently had five entries during a year. BUT each and every one was/is a gem .. and that person has made no effort to publicise their blog so its missed by nearly every one.
6. LOTS OF READERS???
Did you know “The Sun” newspaper is the single most read piece of “literature” in the world? Does that make it good literature? Well, obviously in the eyes of sun readers it does. But I read it this morning out of boredom while drinking coffee in a cafe. I don’t know how anyone can buy it - I really don’t.
November 30th, 2006 06:47
Matthew - thanks for your extensive thoughts. You have identified many of the same issues I did when trying to design the ranking process in the first place!
As you say, most metrics have their short falls, which is the main reason for us using several to calculate the score — hopefully looking at a range of sources will help us iron out blips in some of them.
Your quality of writing comment is interesting. I’ve not heard of Flesch-Kincaid, and will certainly investigate it further. Of course good writing doesn’t mean the blog is good, but it can help. Maybe a blog that is well written will naturally score higher in the other areas? (More people will read it, link to it etc.)
You also touched on people harvesting links etc (i.e. spammers or nearly spammers). These guys are harder and harder to spot, and I rely on people letting me know when they spot a splog. I keep meaning to integrate with splogspot too, but haven’t got around to that yet.
I’m not so sure I agree with your point about frequency of posting though. The blog you refer to may have some great content, but does that make it a good blog? That’s a point open to discussion further…
This has given me another thought though: perhaps technoranki could reward people (i.e. give them a higher score) if they do try and do some of the nice things that make their blog readable by people and machine - like construct good sentences, have RSS feeds, have compliant HTML, don’t have too many accessibility issues and so on? These are areas that I’m sure most of us could improve on, and by rewarding people to attend to these issues, we could make the world a better place…
Anyway, thanks again for your useful input.
December 3rd, 2006 17:48
Matthew,
Found your thoughts interesting on what makes a good blog. One quick comment on the quality of writing section. You mention Flesch=Kincaid, which is an interesting measure, but it is not necessarily one that relates to quality. It is a readability measure, with the F-K score of a piece of writing generally corresponded to an educational level in the American grade system - meaning that a piece with a certain F-K score should be something that someone at, say, grade 8, should be able to understand.
However, it says nothing about quality. It also ignores the great variety of literary styles a writer could employ: some works considered classics of literature would no doubt score very high on F-K, while others would score very low.
December 3rd, 2006 17:49
Having said that, it does strike me that it would be an interesting stat to track against different blogs. People will often probably prefer writing that is in a particular range. Hmm. Is there a WP plugin in there, if nothing else?
December 3rd, 2006 23:14
I think it’s something I’ll take a look at in more detail to see how it works. As you say Neil, a well written blog doesn’t equal a good blog, but if we can measure it then it may be an interesting thing to display.
The bit that I think will be hard is extracting the actual blog content out of the blog template, so that we can apply the Flesch-Kincaid formula to the actual text.
December 4th, 2006 15:54
There are several “frisky” blogs in the current ranking. I’m all for people writing about whatever floats their boat, but there’s a time and a place for it, and if its on my work desktop it’s neither the right time nor the right place. Perhaps each blog should have a NSFW flag. This would allow two lists to be published, an unexpurgated NSFW version, and a filtered “nice” version that you can safely show your discuss with your boss and family without fear of blushing.
December 4th, 2006 23:21
I agree with most of what has been said, and it’s obvious that a range of factors will have to be applied. RSS is crucial I think, in determining the number of readers - whilst my own blog is split almost exactly 50-50 between visitors & subscribers, I only ever visit my favourite blogs via RSS-and have done for months.
The current top 200 is interesting as well, for the sheer number of blogs I’ve never heard of (not necessarily a bad thing, I agree) but also containing some I just don’t agree with: E.g. No.81 an Arsenal blog that hasn’t been updated for 2 months & was pretty poor anyway-is this really better than Arseblog.com that gets updated every day, and usually always with insightful, amusing content?
No easy answers certainly, but I think RSS, quality of inbound links (not just number), amount of people commenting regularly and update frequency are all near the top of my list.
Good luck.
December 22nd, 2006 12:08
Hello, Mark …
Speaking just for myself, the bogs I love best are the ones where people “speak from the heart” when they post. To me, it doesn’t matter whether they’re “right” or “wrong”. What matters is that they’re opening up and communicating what they really think and feel.
When this happens, there’s a “flow” to the blog that’s almost musical, and one is aware of a sense of kinship or community with the writer.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for a serious discussion of important information, just that it’s the writer’s own personal “spin” on that information that makes it remarkable in the eyes of the viewer, more than the actual information itself … in my humble opinion.
What you’re undertaking with Technoranki is thrillingly ambitious. I wish you well with it … and I hope Santy Claus is good to you this Christmas!
Regards, Elizabeth …
December 22nd, 2006 21:20
Good stuff all this. The readability measures might be useful in qualifying a blog because good writing is readable. that was my thinking there.
i dont get a lot of comments on my blog. And i lost all the ones I had in a recent transfer to wordpress.
i dont get all that many links
but still when you search google for some phrases
bang
my blog top of the list.
i get 2000 individual readers a month on the blog. Is that a lot? i dont know … but then there was one day when i got one thousand seperate readers for one well written well timed piece.
I think this is all a lot of fun. And I appreciate your efforts
March 6th, 2007 21:44
“ 6. LOTS OF READERS???
Did you know “The Sun” newspaper is the single most read piece of “literature” in the world? Does that make it good literature? Well, obviously in the eyes of sun readers it does. But I read it this morning out of boredom while drinking coffee in a cafe. I don’t know how anyone can buy it - I really don’t. ”
Are you forgetting the bible? I’m sure that has a few readers; contains just as many facts as The Sun too.
April 19th, 2007 09:33
I’ve just been browsing the rankings for the first time in a few months and have spotted something of an anomaly.
I am ranked 50, which is nice. Yet, Little Red Boat by Anna Pickard is ranked lower than me, at 69.
A couple of things strike me as strange about this :
1. Her site is read by many more people than mine.
2. It is linked to by many more sites than mine.
3. She is a much more prolific writer than I am.
4. She is ranked higher in the search engines than me.
In fact, I have yet to see a category in which I score higher than her (apart from my mums favourites, but even that was close).
I know you are unwilling to share details of the sorting mechanism, but perhaps you could shed light on why the above would result in her site being lower than mine.
I know you hope that the ranks are considered accurate, and I would certainly like to think of myself as a Top 50 blogger, but things like this only create scepticism in the results.
April 20th, 2007 08:05
Mr Angry, technoranki tracks several statistics about blogs, one of which being traffic. The only way we can track traffic is by the blog placing our tracker image (the little bar graph thing you have on your site) in their blog template.
I’m pleased to see you have this tracker installed, but sad to say that Anna doesn’t. This means the Anna will score zero for traffic, which can have quite an impact on your blog rank.
Hope this answers your question.
Cheers.
April 20th, 2007 10:51
My blog always scored 9/10; then last month it dropped to 8/10, and now it’s coming in at 5/10 and has dropped well out of the top 300.
This is during the period that it has consistently increased its Google PR and also increased its ratings in Technorati and Alexa. It is updated daily almost without fail, is consistently increasing its RSS subscribers, gaining more and more commentators and in any reasonable search usually comes out top.
What am I doing wrong?
May 2nd, 2007 08:25
And now, thirteen days later, it’s back at 9/10. Nothing has changed in the blog itself, nor the blog traffic during this period.
May 31st, 2007 11:43
And now, thirteen days later, it’s back at 9/10. Nothing has changed in the blog itself, nor the blog traffic during this period.
John, I’d just put that down to a passage of data through the system.
There are several blogs higher than mine even though they don’t exist any longer.
I’d advise you to take the figures as indicative rather than definitive.
TT.
October 4th, 2007 12:30
I’d have to say a good measurable piece of info that makes a good blog goes hand in hand with good content… it’s good comments that add to the post and continue the conversation to give people more than one person’s insight. That makes a good blog!