Chris Anderson puts the list kerfluffle in context, arguing as I have that counting the top blogs is not only old-media think but is also a meaningless shuffle of unrelated things that share nothing more than the tool that created them:
To use an analogy, top-blog lists are akin to saying that the bestsellers in the supermarket today were:1. DairyFresh 2% Vitamin D Milk
2. Hayseed Farms mixed grain Bread
3. Bananas, assorted bunches…Which is pointless. Nobody cares if bananas outsell soft drinks. What they care about is which soft drink outsells which other soft drink. Lists only make sense in context, comparing like with like within a category….
My take: this is another reminder that you have to treat niches as niches. When you look at a wildly diverse three-dimensional marketplace through a one-dimensional lens, you get nonsense. It’s a list, but it’s a list without meaning. What matters in the rankings within a genre (or subgenre), not across genres.
The first question is how to organize these things into niches; that’s not easy. The next question is what you measure: Traffic, unique audience, link love all matter but all say different things . And we need to measure new things: meme-starting (the cutting edge), meme-sniffing (cultural canaries), influence (mavens).
And why does this matter, besides mere ego? Because if we are ever to convince advertisers that citizens’ media offers much greater value — greater influence, deeper relationships — than mere content, then we need to provide aggregations and data in a meaningful manner. Oh, yes, there are other things to measure, too: quality and trust. But machine rankings won’t do that. People will. Remember that blogs aren’t technology and they’re not just content. They’re people.
: Take this: A Wall Street Journal report on personal finance blogs.
Does one get to pick one’s own niche? Or is that like picking your own nickname?
If I call my blog “cutting edge”, and wind up ranking 35th, but notice that those same numbers would put me 16th on another list, don’t I try to change my classification?
Not easy, you ain’t kidding!
This reminds me of the academic world. It’s somehow similar to blogging, as the reputation is gained by others ‘linking’ to your articles (citations). Instead of collecting numbers of citations per individual article, so-called ‘impact factor’ is used (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_Factor). Impact factor is an aggregate number for journals which tells ratio of cited/published articles. Your article is then ‘judged’ according to impact factor of journal where it was published. Impact factor can have a huge influence on scientific matters, especially when dealing with bureaucracies, like getting funding, or for career advancement.
Now, the funny part, different fields have vastly different ranges of impact factors (e.g. best journals in mathematics can be in low single digits, best journals in medicine have double digits). Yet, in the eyes of bureaucratic evaluators, the impact factor is one number (together with a number of publications), easily to tabulate and rank accordingly. So some entrepreneurial scientists can boost their careers by working for some time in ‘higher yield’ fields, where even not-so-excellent journal can easily outrank the best one in their native fields.
People will always ‘play the system’ if there is something to be gained. And in present, information overloaded world, high position in such lists is very valuable (see “Matthew Effect” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Effect).
David Weinberger (http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/) is working on a book on tackling classification schemes currently and posts occasional on his research and speeches on the topic.
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