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.