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.