If it is, then it’s really just a question of trying to get stats - page impressions is a good proxy in some places, but the more IT literate a blog’s readership is, the more likely that they’d read it in something like Google Reader and therefore just get a feed rather than a page.

On the flip side, incoming links is an algorithm that discriminates in favour of blogs whose readership is more IT literate (because they are more likely to have their own blogrolls on which to place links.)

Then again, something like Google “PageRank” that tracked the popularity of blogs, and gave more points for an incoming link from a high-quality blog than from a “blog farm” thing.

Ironically, an algorithm that had a built-in bias AGAINST deeply technical subjects might actually be a good “leading indicator” of how popular a blog would end up being.

If we’re into “good” in some other measurement, then everything become more subjective. One key question is whether we should be assessing blogs on the same terms as traditional media, or coming up with a way of dealing with the fact that they are a subtly different communication form.

1: Posting frequency - is there a sweet spot of posts/week that is appropriate?

2: Good-neighbour feed - making the whole of the content available in the feed (Ian Dale!) is surely better than just making a couple of lines available to make people click through (BBC - Preston’s picks)

3: Interaction with other blogs - again, blogs that don’t reference other ongoing discussions aren’t great… but those that ONLY contain trackbacks seem to be sure signs of scammers - is there a sweet-spot that suggests that, maybe 15% of posts containg a link to an external blog post / trackback is the sign of a good blog.

Mark

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.

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.

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.

Are you forgetting the bible? I’m sure that has a few readers; contains just as many facts as The Sun too.

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

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 …