Blogging

Welcome to One of the Top 100 Most Informative Blogs

October 25, 2007 by Mike 8 Comments

Some enterprising grad students in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University just released a tasty little tidbit entitled “Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks.” The authors pose a simple question: Which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere? Well, believe it or not, these (brilliant) researchers concluded that if you could only read 100 blogs to stay up to date, our humble site ought to be one of them!

The methodolgy as presented in the equation-laden research paper appears anything but simple. However, the desired characteristics included number of posts of a blog in 2006, number of inlinks from other blogs inside the dataset, number of outlinks to other blogs in the dataset, and number of all outlinks. Put all that good stuff in a algorithmic blender and out comes 10,000 Birds at #53 on the list. It should come as no surprise that we’re joined by fairly phenomenal company. Most of the big time political blog pundits, both progressive and conservative, are there, as are a plethora of blog celebrities, luminaries, aggregators, and miscreants, though I’m not naming names. I will point out that, while the bioblogosphere seems woefully underrepresented, the SEED Scienceblog collective made the list; they just happened to come in 45 spots below us!

I fail to see true value in this scattershot compilation but, then again, I’m not a genius in the Carnegie Mellon computer science department. If you want to be the first to know about critical news with many, many people coming in the cascade after you, you should definitely play it safe and subscribe to 10,000 Birds!

While I don’t endorse many of the blogs on this list, I will, in the interest of community, completeness, and karma, present the Top 100 blogs (for unit cost case and PA objective function) for your discerning consideration:

Written by Mike

Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.

8 Comments

Seth October 25, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Yeah, but did your traffic go up?
John October 25, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Congratulations, Mike.
It’s a very different list from the Technorati Top 100, which only measures recent inbound links. I think this one is much more representative of the diversity of the blogosphere.
Mike October 25, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Did our traffic go up as we blossomed into this icon of informativeness? Absolutely. From the release of this list… not so much.
Thanks, John. I’m not going to say that this line-up isn’t better for the inclusion of a nature blog, but all of these lists are flawed.
mon@rch October 25, 2007 at 7:16 pm
very cool for sure!! An extra high-five for being one step up from Oâ€™Reilly Radar!!
Clare October 25, 2007 at 9:06 pm
It takes alogry… alorgo… alogrhyth… fancy calculations to let the rest of the world know what we regulars have long known. Congrats Mike, Charlie and Corey
Charlie October 26, 2007 at 7:06 am
Thanks for the kind comments, but I really ought to point out that all the data is based on 2006 – long before Corey and me joined 10,000 Birds: this recognition was all down to Mike’s solo efforts (which he’d be far too modest to say himself).