The funny thing about the blogoland is that people are always trying to figure out authoritiative ways of ranking people so you can… I don’t know, compare your status with other blogopeople? Technorati does this with some success mainly because they are married to WordPress in such a tight way that they get a lot of data, and also because people seem to go along with or take stock in what they say. When PubSub was coming out with its link rankings it was an interesting attempt to quantify something we could feel and not quite see, and yet the numbers didn’t seem to really mean anything, or map on to anything with any degree of predictability. Predictability is when you the blogger think “If I link to this story about a book banning over the work scrotum, that is probably going to attract a lot of inbound links which might affect my popularity ratings in places like Technorati.” We may be considered link whores if we do this deliberately, but we’d be a little clueless if we didn’t understand how these things work.
All that is my lead-in to mentioning that this blog is #1 on a list of ranked blogs — Top 25 Librarian Bloggers (By the Numbers). To my mind this is mostly saying “Jessamyn’s blog has been around the longest” which is mostly true. Jenny had a blog-type site before The Shifted Librarian, but it’s not around now. What’s Gnu was the first library-oriented blog I read but it’s only available now at the Internet Archive. People I read regularly — Meredith, Michael, Stephen — didn’t make the list due to some quirks in the decisions OEDB made on who would be included. A few other people who did make the list ponder about it: Walt, Ryan, Sarah, Von, Jason and, of course, Anonymous.
A few other interesting points. Google’s Librarian Central is on the list despite having a Technorati rank of zero. Somehow they have a Google page rank of seven, how about that? The top 25 were picked from a field of 55 which seems a little sparse. Meredith’s recently posted survey results indicate there are hundreds of library and librarian bloggers. With the exception of the Law Librarian blog the rest of the top ten are what I consider “old timers” (though I may be wrong about the Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette which I was sure had been delighting me much longer than just two years) which supports what I asserted earlier, that a lot of page rank and Technorati rank and DMOZ inclusion (seriously, DMOZ?) have to do with longevity.
In any case, it’s always nice to have an excuse to read more librarian blogs that I might not see in my daily travels. Also, I should mention that today is my birthday. So, if you’re so inclined, tell me in the comments what your blog or website is #1 in… whatever the heck it is. It will amuse me, spread the link love around, and give everyone a little more to read. We could all use more to read.
Happy Birthday! My gaming blog was briefly number one for a Star Wars based Friday Funny. As far as library blogs, it ain’t mine, but the.effing.librarian cracks me up.
First, Happy Birthday :) Second, I think my blog is #1 in flying under everyone’s radar considering I’ve been around for four years ;) I recently realized (like within the last two weeks) that if you search the terms librarian weblog (without quotes) in Google, I beat you in the rankings. However, if you search librarian blog, I’m not even in the top 250 results. I changed the description in Blogger to specifically include the word blog, but otherwise, I’m very enh about it. People do know who I am, and I’ve got readers according to Bloglines. What I have to say gets out to the people who want to hear it.
“What I have to say gets out to the people who want to hear it.”
Which is the best possible response, I think, to rankings like this. (Even if I’m guilty of doing similar things…at least I don’t use bizarro exclusion criteria.)
Jessamyn, good post.
that guy Terry is a liar. I crack up no one.
Great post…made me aware of a few things with my own blog. While my google pagerank is quite good (6), I don’t show at all for a search for ‘Librarian blog’. On the other hand, the criteria used is pretty random.
I don’t know anyone among us that is getting a million hits a month like Stephen, so I guess I’m in ok company. :-)
Virgos! Happy Birthday. I also read the blog “Tales from the Liberry” which almost always makes me laugh and relate to as a fellow public librarian.
Thanks for this critical view of these, and any other, rankings. As usual, you are right on Jessamyn.
Happy Birthday Jessamyn and thanks for sharing all the time that you do with us on your blog. It is so very much appreciated.
I liked your point about link baiting, and how we’d be a little clueless if we didn’t know how these things worked. Also liked that you pointed out that G. Librarian Central is a bit out of place. Not really a librarian blog now is it? :)
Great thoughts Jessamyn, and Happy Birthday!
Good points, Jessamyn! I was mostly struck that most of the top bloggers know one another, and not because we get together at the Famous Bibliobloggers’ Convention, either. (I’m going to look up “Tales from a Liberry.”)
Happy birthday, from one Virgo to another!
It’s not a blog, but I have the best Web site for water librarians.
My blog’s mood depends on whether I’m in school or not- when I’m taking classes, you’ll find a lot of posts about my classes. (go figure)
I’m still finding my voice in my blog (and the library world in general). So far it has been the best at putting me in contact with long lost friends, relatives, and teachers.
My blog is #? in being a blog by a librarian that is not about libraries (it’s about comics and not about comics in libraries)… at least I think, who knows, but I’ll pretend. I often wonder how many librarians there are out there that are blogging about non-library subjects.
I used to be pretty high up in the search results for the list of words expurgated between the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. Yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got.
Happy birthday one day late!
Happy Birthday J, I’m an irregular reader and a regular fan. I’ve got 4 kids, so I not only don’t have much spare time to post to my own blog, but have yet to analyze how best to increase my page ranks. I did google ‘school librarian blog’ and turned up on the 7th page of results. Hooray for me, what do I win for being 70th out of 1,910,000 pages?
Chris
It is all very strange, isn’t it?
Just for the record, The Librarians’ Site du Jour does still live on (albeit frozen in time) at http://jennyscybrary.lishost.org/sitejour.html, 1995-1999, hand-coded and then done in FrontPage, all manually archived. Ah, the good old days….
oh thanks for that jenny. I went to jennyscybrary.com but didn’t see it. Ah memories!
Actually, I don’t think it’s got quite as much to do with longevity per se as it has with the way in which a weblog is used and promoted in part by the owner. Also, how long it’s been in the same place. For example, I’ve had a weblog since February 2003, firstly with Blogger hosted on my site and more recently with TypePad. Same blog, same readership, same type of content – just in a different place. Does that make it a ‘different’ blog? Apparently it does. That’s pretty much like saying that the same edition of a book is different because one has the cover still on and the other has it off.
Secondly, as has been pointed out all over the place, the methodology is very poor, and demands that the author should have taken some steps to optimize the blog – my ‘old’ one is in DMOZ, the ‘new’ one isn’t – because I really wasn’t that bothered to put it there. It’s also not badged as library or blog either – that’s what it’s about, but that’s not what I chose to call it.
I think there’s also an issue of geography here as well. Much of what I write is appropriate to an audience of British, rather than American librarians. As such it’s understandable that not so many American librarians read it. Which means that it’s not as popular. However, that depends entirely on how you define popular, and doing it by the numbers is only one way, leading to an inevitable bias in favour of the biggest reading bloc as it were.
So, while longevity does play a part – of course it does – it’s only one of a great many aspects.
hey it’s me, Belated Bouncing Back and Catching up on RSS jennimi. happy happy happy, consummate Virgo.
i think my blog is #1 in “jennimi,” which rather meets its mission. it may also be the #1 liblog in “still trying to figure out and balance upon the fine line between professional and personal and finally just saying the heck with it i am who i am which is librarian and a whole mess of other stuff” – but it’s kinda hard to test that scientifically.
incidentally, i have posted before and probably will again that while i respect Technorati immensely for what they do, i still don’t agree that the amount of incoming links should necessarily have the weight it does in assigning weight.
it’s collection development 101 really: circ stats (hits) and incoming links (recommendations) are but part of the story…. the bots and algorithms still don’t have a way of measuring worth or contribution of content, and that isn’t necessarily completely described by the above either.
no two ways about it though, congrats to librarian.net for numero uno. :)