Three months ago I did a similar project to list 25 online political writers. In that exercise, I mostly focused on evaluating the structure of each site as it related to expectations of blogging and journalism. Here I am trying to figure out how to answer a different question: who is recognized as having something original– uniquely linkable– to say? Here’s the chart. The explanations for the columns follow.
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Legend?
Who’s who: This is not the A-List. These are people who identify as bloggers (with one exception– me, as a reference point) and who seem to write about social media a good portion of the time. They are listed in order of the number of incoming links. As it happens, this list follows a logarithmic scale: the top 6 are linked to over 2400 times; the top 13 are linked to over 1200 times; the top 19 are linked to over 600 links; the top 25 are linked to over 300 times. There are 33, including 6 group blogs. Of the individuals I have briefly met 7, and have corresponded with 6 others. Ihave only listed English language bloggers, so I am missing Jean-Pierre Cloutier of Quebec, il est l’un des interprètes les plus populaires de blogueurs dans le monde de langue française.
Some of the names are abstractions. For compactness I have compacted some names of people I don’t know personally: Liz Lawley is Elizabeth Lane Lawley; Jon Dube is Jonathan Dube, whose CyberJournalist blog is affiliated with the American Press Institute. Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs is group-written. JOHO is short for Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, which is represents the online publishing collection of David Weinberger: and he calls his blog “JOHO the Blog.” Weinberger, Lawley, and boyd contribute to Corante Many 2 Many.
The occupation is grossly an abstraction, particularly with “Entrepreneur” or “Consultant.” Thus I have concocted the anagram CLUB to denote some more practical considerations: Conference-goer/presenter? Linked to by other people in this list? University-affiliated? Book-published? When people talk about the A-list, they are thinking of the people who have letters in this CLUB.
Location is close to reality, though it’s been noted that those on the conference circuit seem to live mostly at airports. Not surprisingly, the top US tech centers are represented. “BayArea” is the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley and Berkeley. The US-Mass. are people who live or work in Cambridge, MA, home of Harvard and MIT. Ethan Zuckerman, who lives in Western Mass., supplies this headline for his blog: “My blog is in Cambridge, but my heart is in Accra.” Two are from the UK and one is from Japan.
There are two years listed: the first marks when the person began writing online; the second when they began publishing more or less regularly via a blog. Thus Steven Johnson is recognized for launching FEED in 1995. My own initial foray into online publishing, the development of a college webzine in 1994, is of trivial importance to my pedigree. The point here was to try and recognize the varying experiences. (Seth asked me in a follow-up whether USENET postings from the 1980’s were significant…)
Frequency representing the number of individual posts published in the first 12 weeks of 2005. Some software is makes it easier to count than others– MovableType and Drupal number their posts. For certain sites like Scoble and SixApart I had to estimate. This number generally is inversely related to the size of the posts. The variance in the number of posts is due to writing style; some perfer the classical blogging approach of “filter” links, while others supply “filler” of travel plans and travel photos, etc.
Subscriptions come from Bloglines. These are imperfect, since many blogs supply multiple feeds. And there is no clarity on how these reflect the number of readers overall, since many use tools other than bloglines.
Links and Sources are provided by the Technorati service. For Dan Gillmor, I have combined the links to his old San Jose Mercury News column/blog. It was not feasible to include the links from every outside website; Eszter Hargittai pointed out to me that many people link to her stories not on her own blog but on the popular academic group blog Crooked Timber. And fundamentally the links and sources are very rudimentary data. The assumption that a link is the most effective vote of confidence in an online resource underlies both Google’s PageRank and Tom Coates’s analysis. Many of these links are provided context-free in blogrolls. In the last few months, David Sifry introduced a way to indicate a link can have neutral scoring or negative scoring. He could collect data as to how this has been used, but so far he has not presented it to his blog.
Analysis?
If this data had much use we might try to run a little rudimentary analysis on it. I do it here because my curiousity demands it.
It would appear that the number of links a site gets correspond the amount of separate material published on that site: the more you write, the more people will link to you. So then there is some other factor, call the amplification factor A. The bigger factor A you have, the more effective a writer you are, the more likely it is that a given piece you write somebody will find useful enough to cite later. If you have a small A by virtue of posting many times, you would reconsider whether it is necessary to post so many times, or merely wonder whether A is a useful measure at all for effectiveness.
That is of course my larger point, that a rational measure of effectiveness could be developed, but it has not been.
Divide by the number posts in the last 12 weeks: call that A1. Now let’s consider that many links to sites are listed in blogrolls once, so let’s discount all of those, and subtract the sources from the links and divide that into the frequency. We re-scale it and call it A2. Finally let’s factor in the number of years that a person has been blogging, suggesting a larger total number of links. We re-scale it and call it A3. This number could be improved by just fishing out the total number of posts, but remember: these are cheap calculations of imperfect data.
But we still see some patterns. We could think of these as some leading indicators of how things could be.
So who’s on top?
For one, not my friends. I have never met Rebecca or Seth, but they have been of tremendous help to me over email conversations. Seth and I share similar perspectives and reading habits, are in recent days we may be seen posting in tandem on various blogs on this list. I am so grateful to them both that I have rewarded them by putting them in the bottom half of the final ratings, with me.
Four stand out each time: Rosen, Ito, Corante, Sifry. Johnson, Dash, Powers split fifth place.
As for the leaders, anyway you look at the numbers, one things stands out: what Jay Rosen does has no relation at all to what Dave Winer does. Rosen posts 3 times a week, and posts long essays with long follow-ups recapping the conversations. “News is a conversation, not a lecture!” he is fond of saying– yet few mimic his structure. Rosen is able to achieve the popularity he does not by the blogging style (the reverse-chronological format is hardly necessary when articles are that long), but simply by making the sort of concrete statements and presentations of fact that can be debated.
Corante’s Many-2-Many group blog also gets high marks, because that’s where Clay Shirky holds court, who also has the good habit of making concrete statements (Liz, danah, and David Weinberger also contribute). Perhaps this reflects that most pieces published on collaberative sites tend to be more on-topic than a personal blog.
David Sifry also gets high marks since he posts from time-to-time about something very concrete and in demand: technological developments and raw data from Technorati, which indexes weblogs. Like Jay, he escapes the common perception of bloggers as commenting on other news regularly– he’s the one producing the news.
Steven Johnson is one of the pioneering Internet journalists, and is the author of a number of books related to social media, dating back to 1997’s Interface Culture. Joi Ito and Anil Dash were both instrumental in the founding of Six Apart, the company which supplies the popular blogging tools MovableType and TypePad. Ito was its first investor and Dash was its first employee, so I would guess that they are well known throuth the users of Six Apart’s software, which through growth and acquisitions now provides services for 6.5 million bloggers worldwide. If I were a user of Six Apart software, I would make sure to read them as well.
Who’s underrated?
As we apply the newer factors, Shelley Powers overtakes Anil Dash. Shelley is a tremendous writer, having authored/co-authored a dozen technical books. She also avoids the practice on riffing on the news, in the classical blogging tradition– she writes original that are worth linking to and conversing over. (And that’s not even factoring in that a good deal of her writings have nothing to do with technology, they are just breathtaking travel pictures.) A couple of weeks ago, she implored for David Sifry to retire the Technorati “Top 100” ratings: “too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority.’” Curiously, as I’ve remove the noise from the ratings, Shelley’s ranking rises. So I’ll close with her closing words to that piece:
If I had a wish right now, I would wish one thing: that we remove all of our blogrolls and take down the EcoSystem and the Technorati 100 and all of the other ‘popularity’ lists. That whatever links exist, are honest ones based on what has been written, posted, published, not some static membership in a list that is, all too often, stale and out of date, and used as a weapon or a plea.
I would suggest the same for your syndication lists, too–when did you last update it to reflect those sites you really read? I would be content,though, if centralized aggregators such as Bloglines stopped publishing the number of subscriptions for each feed. After all, what true value is this information?
Then we would all start fresh. It would be a new start, and the emphasis would be less on who we know and who we are, then what is being said.
Afterword. I sent this to the principals listed above, and heard back from nine, and many gave constructive comments. First I tightened up the analysis section, trimming out some speculative statements that really had no bearing on the main point.
A couple of people questioned my including Shelley’s quote. Her point was not to banish rankings from the Earth. She advocates we all “start fresh”– not only Technorati but the people (the blogging public) that supplies the raw atoms for Technorati to aggregate its data. We see the current data as misleading and unhelpful. As Shelley’s solution is a bit unlikely, I propose a different tack: the development of more advanced methods for classifying online opinion and opinion-makers.
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