A State of Nature

~ Laura

One of my ongoing problems with blog research is putting together the sample. There is no one definitive list of blogs. Do you go with the Technorati top 100, which skews toward the technology and personal blogs? Or do you use the The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, which has a larger list of blogs and has more of the political blogs, but also the reputation for favoring the conservative blogs? Both lists rank blogs by the number of links, which favor the old time blogs and may not really reflect popularity. But there is no definitive list based on hits, because there are several different counters in existence. (Check out the TTLB’s traffic list for the day. Kos is getting 500,000 hits a day now. FARK is getting over a million. Really amazing numbers.)

If you are looking at a subset of bloggers, like I’m doing now, is it is even more problematic. There are some directories of subgenera of blogs spread around the blogosphere. For example, Crooked Timber has the most definitive list of academic bloggers. However, Henry Farrell has discussed the problems with maintaining such a cumbersome and fluid list. Other areas of the blogosphere have less leadership; they lack a central hub to organize.

Perhaps the next Nick Denton project should be to put together a yellow pages for blogs. It would help new bloggers find their blog community more quickly. Readers could locate like-minded bloggers more easily. And it might help me out as well.

Published by Laura

5 thoughts on “A State of Nature”

  1. BlogHer’s list of blogs is getting bigger by the day.
    How would you identify your blog (or mine for that matter)? We both write about a range of subjects. Are we mommybloggers? I don’t think so, but we do write about our kids some.
    I think the model I have in the back of my head is in the general-interest magazine area, but (for the most part) excluding politics.
    I wouldn’t call myself an edublogger, but I do write about educational issues (esp k-12) a lot.

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  2. General-interest is a good category. How about society and culture? Life and politics? Content suppliers? You could also claim multiple hats – parenting blogger, edublogger, and societal blogger.

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  3. I don’t classify my blog as belonging to any category. The blog format by definition lends itself to eclecticism. I tend to favor technorati’s rankings because it shows exactly which posts are linked to various blogs. Since I have a blog with a very small readership and very few links I find this feature fascinating.

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  4. If you are looking for a good index, try BlogShares. The index there is actively managed by real human volunteers, and they try to eliminate anything not updated in the past 6 months. It’s organized by “Industries” and relatively easy to track down different categories. For an interesting example, take a look at the education industry – 503 active blogs, plus 17 sub-industries.

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