Just to be clear on this, This Blogebrity list is:

1) an attempt to win a Contagious Media Contest and
2) an attempt to put a People’s magazine-like spin on blogger popularity

If we put aside for a moment what Scoble — and I’m sure many others — consider rather transparent link whoring, a more interesting list, rather than A-B-C based on assumed (?) popularity, would be to analyze the links in and out structure via Technorati, as Seth Finkelstein compared ratios:

Infothought has 81 Links from 68 Sources
The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, April 19, 2004 has 3055 Links from 2481 Sources

Hmm. This got me thinking.

I decided to break out the Technorati API specs and whip up a quick script to spider the aforementioned A-B-C list and return the current links/in out for all participants.

Using this curious little tool I could then determine based on some measurable amount of link popularity where a particular blog fit ranked among other blogs using Technorati stats and a custom quality ratio which is determined by dividing the number of link sources by incoming links. Blogs with a bunch of links from a smaller number of sources would therefore have a lower quality percentage. Also, this list could be reordered and resorted by these figures, in addition to alphabetically.

This seemed like a more scientific A-B-C-Other list. The “other” list is where anybody could add their blog to the list (that is listed on Technorati and has a Technorati API key). I contacted the folks at Blogebrity and they responded excitedly over this concoction.

So I put this program: BlogCompare in its own subdirectory here with robots.txt currently set to ignore it so it (hopefully) won’t be spammed. I may change the robots.txt thing later, but it’s that way at least for now as a deterrent for inviting spam/spammers. It’s not a full fledged service or program or anything ‘official’ but readers and other bloggers are more than welcome to use it while it’s there, however long it lasts. And oh, yes, the white space to the right does have a future purpose … I’ll keep quiet about that for now.

Feel free to play around with the sorting and compare blog stats. Some blogs show inaccurate stats which I realize is a bit buggy because they do show stats in Technorati, but what shows there is what came through the API calls. I didn’t investigate further to see why it was returning incomplete/inaccurate data for some blogs, but I’m sure it’s something simple to fix. Maybe somebody here reading already knows about this?

I didn’t spend very much time on this fun little tool, so don’t take the numbers too seriously. I also added a usage counter in the lower right hand corner. It seems it was used 150+ times already this morning. You can always click on the Technorati graphic to see what the actual stats are if you are in doubt about a given blog. I also see a possible usage for making it easier to sign up for RSS feeds.

Enjoy!

tags: technorati, api, blogs, stats

Did this post make you go hmm?

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• BlogCompare v0.3.1 changelog
• Blogcompare stats updated 8/29
• Navel gazing Technorati #1-10 and #90-100 unique monthly visitors
• Technorati recent links not always recent
• How to add a link to another site with a blogspot / blogger hosted blog