G'day! Thanks for returning!
There are almost as many Top 100 blog lists as there are centimetres around my girth.
Of particular interest to me as a business communication consultant are those blogs that revolve around either my industry or my location — based on the logic of ‘how can I advise my clients effectively if I cannot get myself positioned appropriately in either two realms?’
Meg Tsiamis and I have been chatting about how to more accurately reflect the top aussie blogs in light of the difficulties Meg has in compiling the list.
I have a lot more subscribers than some of the other top 100 blogs, but continue to fall outside the top 100. Huh? Surely subscriber numbers should be weighted higher than currently are? They are, after all, a reflection of ’stickiness’.
Meg agrees. As she says,
I agree that subscribers are a very important measure of a blog’s success, if not the most important and I have expressed my frustration at this.
The one problem that I have is that not everybody uses FeedBurner, which means that the list would be restricted to those that do (and those who make that number visible). That would exclude a lot of people.
I have considered putting an addition onto the list for “other highly subscribed blogs” (or words to that effect), what do you think?
I guess my biggest ‘beef’ is with the ‘Top 100′ tag. There is no doubt that some of them aren’t in reality in the top 100; perhaps another table, positioned higher on the page than the top 100 (after all, who scrolls down even further to read another table after scrolling down a long list already?) of those blogs who have declared their subscriber numbers?
This isn’t such a burden to blog owners as it might first appear, as Feedburner has introduced a really cool app called FeedBurner FeedSmith that will take all and every subscriber to your blog, no matter which feed they take it from, and deliver the numbers. It means that the numbers fluctuate more than usual, but it means that no subscriber is left out, no matter where your feed originally comes from.
Says the app’s author, Steve Smith:
The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.
The downside of FeedSmith is that it is currently only for WordPress blogs; and yes, that is a big downside. But hopefully an app for the other platforms will arrive shortly.
And with regard to subscriber numbers, I would have thought it important in this age of trust, transparency, truth and accountability that bloggers publish their subscriber/circulation numbers. After all, magazines and newspapers have to.
Perhaps, Meg, you can strongly suggest to your list that they disclose their subscriber numbers.
What does the community think?
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Currently listening to: Tom Waits – ‘Small Change’
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101 ways to power-up your writing.
