Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Wikio top blogs: what's your blog ranking?






Wikio - Top Blogs - Technology

Wikio, a European-based online news and blog aggregator and search engine, started their "Top Blogs" rankings earlier this year, and I'm pleased that ACE is currently ranked no. 300-something in their list of Top Technology Blogs (the lower the number the better: no. 1 is Techcrunch, at the moment). See the shiny new Wikio badge in my sidebar and above?

They told ACE that the position of blogs in their Wikio ranking "depends on the number and value of links that other blogs point toward them. The value of these links depends on the ranking of the blog publishing them. So in our algorithm, the value of a link published on a highly ranked blog is more important than a posted link on a blog with a lower ranking. This way, we hope to produce a ranking more representative of blogs' influence." (More on how Wikio produce their rankings: blogrolls are not counted, nor links from blog posts older than 120 days.)

As well as Technology, they have categories and associated "top blogs" listings for other areas such as Business, Celebrity, Film, Food & Wine, Health, Music, Politics and Sciences. I'm not sure how they decide which category a blog goes into, if it could fit more than one. I notice that Techcrunch is also no. 1 under "Entertainment", which suggests they'll add a blog to more than one category if they want to or, perhaps, if you ask them very nicely. It's also tells us something about what Wikio consider to be "entertainment"!

Obviously, a major purpose of the rankings is to help readers decide which blogs to read, by showing them which are thought to be the "top" blogs in particular subject areas.

How to check the ranking of your own blog in a particular category? If you want to use Wikio for a form of egosurfing, just go to the category on Wikio (choose from the list on the left) and search for the name or URL of your blog in the "Find a blog" box. It will also provide a figure for your blog's overall ranking if you search in the "General" category.

(The eagle eyed may have spotted that I've updated my blog template not just to add a Wikio badge but also to de-Technorati-fy most of it. Technorati blog rankings haven't been updated properly for yonks now, and they've never sorted out their early bug preventing them from picking up tags from blog posts properly. I still use their blog search engine to check on how many blogs have talked about a particular subject or linked to a particular webpage, but that's about all I feel it's good for now.)

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