Archive
Blogmon selection – the best blogs in 2008
I’ve been running Blogmon since February 2008. You can find more information about this micro service here. In essence it is capable of monitoring blogs and bloggers progress using the Technorati data over time(rank mainly).
Most time we can easily find the top bloggers out there but there are many great bloggers in the middle of the pack or beginners that are marching quickly up the blogsphere. I hope that Blogmon is helping in exposing the rapid movements and progress of few bloggers out there. I some time view it as my own dynamic Favorites that is occasionally reminding me of blogs that are worth more visits. I’m happy to share it with you.
In 2008 Blogmon monitored over 1,000 blogs, some were discovered by me or shared by friends through Twitter and other Social Networks, and others pragmatically by crawling the web. The service reported 658 updates (as of today) through Twitter @Blogmon account along with information about their progress over the year.
Here are Blogmon’s 10 best bloggers for 2008:
| Blog | Blogger | Baseline Rank | Current Rank | Gain from Baseline |
| Startup Meme – Technology Startup and Latest Tech News | Bilal Hameed | 1,910,875 | 11,089 | 99.4% |
| Parenting ideas from dads – dad-o-matic | Founded by the legendary Chris Brogan and authored by friends | 1,943,068 | 29,490 | 98.5% |
| Doug Haslam | Doug Haslam | 1,072,771 | 18,984 | 98.2% |
| Reflections of Time | Milton Chai | 4,978,471 | 93,172 | 98.1% |
| Cool Mom Guide | Julie maloney | 1,546,784 | 44,421 | 97.1% |
| Enter the Octopus | Matt Staggs | 736,965 | 24,853 | 96.6% |
| The Lessnau Lounge – Finding the American dream | John Lessnau | 605,911 | 32,945 | 94.6% |
| Six Revisions – Web Development and Design Information | Jacob Gube | 17,159 | 939 | 94.5% |
| ToastedRav | ToastedRav Staff | 1,245,176 | 93,172 | 92.5% |
| Social media PR from Press Release PR owner Danny Brown | Danny Brown | 1,286,970 | 103,392 | 92.0% |
I have one more super excellent blog on Blogmon top list – yes, good guess:) Since Chris is well known (yet still is working very hard as you can see below) I wanted to allow room for one more new blogger that is storming up the blogsphere. Yes, Danny it is you – keep the good work going.
| Social media business strategy and more | Chris Brogan | 1,512 | 61 | 96.0% |
The idea behind Blogmon is monitoring progress. Most time you can only see a snapshot of the current state not telling about the direction (up, down or stagnant). Blogmon keeps historical information and can compute both the speed and direction (velocity) with the intention of exposing talented hard working bloggers before everybody else knows about them.
Happy new year and have a great #bl09ing year!
Anyway, for a better 2009 (the Creed One lyrics)
BlogMon – The only way is up!
What is BlogMon?
You can find here results from a small application I wrote for monitoring Technorati rank changes over time. I find these blogs and bloggers in two ways:
- The first is the same way as you add links to your favorites when you like the content. I browse, I like it, I add it to the list of blogs to scan. If you follow me on Twitter @kerendg and your blog is listed on your Twitter About section I will be tempted to monitor it.
- The second is pragmatically by “crawling” the data in a certain way that is helping me to find more great resources.
I see it as if I have “dynamic Favorites” – a list of blogs that is worth to get back to. This is great way to find who is consistently getting the crowd’s attention. I know that it seems simple but I have my share of complexity dealing with multiple constrains and “interesting” data.
The patterns reported using Twitter (on daily bases)
I plot daily results to my Twitter @Blogmon account
- Rank Change: more than 25% gain in rank since baseline and at least 7 scans (snapshots)
- New High: more than 35% gain in rank since the first Rank Change report. The application reports the first time and then if the blog reached a new high the tool will report only every 30 day since last report.
The information reported to BlogMon results web site
The A-list blogs consists of bloggers with Technorati rank under 1000 (in other words the subset of the top 1000 bloggers that I monitor).
I publish monthly results to BlogMon Results for the A-list, and for the rest here. The rest are bloggers that moved up in rank more than 50% since the baseline (the first time I started monitoring them).
Speed: calculates as the percentage gain in rank divided by the number of days it took to make it.
Perfect records – these are the rare blogs that are moving up consistently. The conditions are at list 9 scans (snapshots) and more than 20% gain in rank.
You got nothing to loose – The only way is up^
Joining in – if you’ de like me to monitor your blog please submit your name and blog URL in the small form on the BlogMon home page. EMAIL IS OPTIONAL!!! – I don’t need it for monitoring you blog. I do need your Blog URL. Please add it in the Comments section.
Your blog need to be claimed on Technorati.
I only report if your blog is going up. So, if you are not doing so great, now, your blog will not appear in the statistics. So, there is nothing to loose by joining in. If the blog is not going up in more than 30 days I will slow down the scans for this blog from every other day to every week. So, if your blog is making good progress you can show it off (or charge more from your sponsors).
The tools
I’m using Weebly to build the Blogmon Results web site. It is a great service that saves me a ton of time. I use Google Docs to generate the spreadsheets. I can publish them online and then embed the table as an iFrame inside the web pages – another great time saver.
Some statistics:
- I monitor 794 blogs. I scan 252 blogs weekly. The rest every other day.
- Most of the blogs reside between 1-100,000 rank
- In August I had 70 blogs that were making good progress (more than 50% than the baseline rank).
- in August I had 22 blogs on the A-List
Any ideas how to make it more useful and interesting?
Speed comes from quality
After few month of monitoring Technorati rank progress for few hundreds of blogs I was looking for a way to compare the ones who are making significant positive rank shifts. The way Technorati rank work in is that if the value is going down it means that the blog’s position is improving and there are less blogs ahead of it on the way to the top. It is hard to compare rank moves when the variance in rank is so huge.
So I looked at blogs that had more than 50% positive rank change and I started looking at the speed of their progress.
The way I calculated the (average) speed is:
- Speed = Percentage gain (from baseline) / Duration
- Duration = last rank update date – first rank update date (in whole days)
- The units of this calculation is: percentage change in rank/day (or percent per day).
You can see the full table with the results in here (using Google Docs ). :
Blogger’s Speed results – 6/6/2008 (If WP could support (i)Frame it was possible to see this table embaded inside this post, sigh).
Here is a subset of the table:
| url | speed | gain | # days | start rank |
| http://learntoduck.com | 0.48 | 55.1% | 114 | 92012 |
| http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com | 1.11 | 57.1% | 51 | 87897 |
| http://dossy.org/ | 0.55 | 60.4% | 109 | 68166 |
| http://www.prfekt.se | 1.31 | 58.1% | 44 | 67717 |
| http://gobigalways.com | 1.72 | 52.3% | 30 | 49059 |
| http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com | 0.52 | 59.3% | 114 | 27786 |
| http://bing-thegreeninme.blogspot.com | 0.81 | 67.1% | 82 | 27170 |
| http://sixrevisions.com | 1.46 | 70.5% | 48 | 17159 |
| http://www.veronicabelmont.com | 0.45 | 53.0% | 118 | 16708 |
I highlighted (bolded) few of the lines to show how speedy these bloggers are. There are a couple of bloggers like Doug Haslam and Jennifer Leggio (Mediaphyter) that are showing consistent improvement even if they are not the fastest in their group (they have beautiful positive monotonic rising curve) .
The table is sorted by the starting rank (baseline). The blank lines were added between blocks of bloggers that started in a similar rank range.
Note: I assume that the Technorati ranking system is not liner and somehow things are moving faster where the rank is a really large numbers (i.e. at the bottom of the blogsphere). This make it a little harder to compare between blogs with great disparity in ranks ranges yet it only emphasize how great are the bloggers that manage to move fast even at the top. This is not exact math so please take it with a grain of salt. Maybe one day when somebody come up with a different ranking system he can take my approach in consideration.
A couple of thoughts:
- Speed within category – it will be great to compare how different bloggers are doing within their domain of interest/expertise.
- Acceleration/Deceleration – in this method I actually calculated the average speed moving between the baseline rank and the latest. What that I don’t show here is who’s speed is accelerating and who’s is slowing down. This could be monitored as well. One more thing that I can plot to BlogMon (Twitter)
Since I did not make the links in the table clickable I added them below (you can also click on the link from the Google doc table:
http://travellperkins.com, http://www.multichannelmetrics.com, http://blog.francinekizner.com, http://doughaslam.com, http://www.four20.net, , http://mediaphyter.wordpress.com, http://www.seotops.com, http://www.purplecar.net/, http://www.twitterholics.com, , http://learntoduck.com, http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com, http://dossy.org/, http://www.prfekt.se, http://gobigalways.com, http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com, http://bing-thegreeninme.blogspot.com, http://sixrevisions.com, http://www.veronicabelmont.com, http://daily.mahalo.com/, http://thenextweb.org, http://www.bloggerbuster.com, http://blog.twitter.com, http://laughingsquid.com, http://www.37signals.com/svn/, http://refueled.net, http://www.blogher.com, http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch, http://www.designspongeonline.com/, http://blog.makezine.com, http://www.mixx.com
So who do you want to put your bet on?
Keren Dagan
Recent Comments