As of 8/29/05, BlogCompare stats have been updated, synchronized with the Technorati API, Alexa API and Blogebrity lists. Go check and see if your blog is there and if not, feel free to add it.

There has been a lot of talk about the Feedster 500 list and I have thought about adding another row in BlogCompare for that top 500 list so blogs in both databases could be tracked, ranked and sorted. It will be interesting to see in September, which is only two short days away how many blogs that were in the top 500 in August drop off in September.

Thank you to all those who read, link and subscribe to Things That … Make You Go Hmm, as this blog has made the inaugural Feedster Top 500 blog list for August 2005. And thank you to Feedster for creating this monthly list.

Feedster CEO Scott Rafer explains how this ranking was determined:

It is a ranking of the blogs with the most inbound links over time, however only blogs with posts in the last seven days were included.

I downloaded the Feedster top 500 tab delimited file and ran the list against blogcompare and found 120 blogs existed in both lists. Something about this doesn’t seem right, so think I’ll check this again later more closely.

Jason Calacanis likes the top 500 list, but is being taken to task by some dissenting commenters because the list shows Engadget at the #1 spot. Kevin Burton fails to “see why this is that interesting” but thinks it is cool that they provided the raw data. Scoble: “Me? I’m #74. Very honored. But, personally, it’s not a big deal.”

Will be back later after our daily workout, running late!

Update: Successfully re-claimed this feed (I’ve done this before) and for some reason my icon isn’t showing, even after I tried to upload several times. Apparently this is buggy … or it’s cached.

We’re still vacationing, but I snatched a few minutes to briefly scan the RSS aggregator and (manually) update the Blogcompare stats.

Earlier in the week it seems that Technorati was getting bashed again. Doc Searls summarizes the bashing which seem to have been precipitated by some inopportune pitching during a panel discussion.

It’s too bad Technorati hasn’t been bought by Yahoo, Google or Microsoft and yet I’m wondering if that wasn’t the Technorati gameplan all along? They take VC funding and build up a semi-working prototype and hope to be purchased by a bigger fish and make the investors fat. The problem with this type of strategy — and it’s merely musing aloud, I have no insider knowledge — is that if the service in question isn’t firing on all cylinders (and one could argue that Technorati never has fired on all cylinders) it won’t be attractive to the bigger fish. I see lots of people talking about Bloglines citations and Blogpulse. Maybe when we get back home I’ll look into seeing if either of those services offer an API. Or perhaps somebody in the comments will clue me in before we get back.

This is post #12 in the vacation 2005 series and finally I have enough posts so that somebody will win the Blog is Right contest. Regular blogging should return in the not too distant future. Alrighty, the kids are calling and it’s time to get back on the road to our next vacation destination.

tag: vacation2005

BlogCompare version 0.3.1 is now available with the following changes/additions:

v0.3.1 changelog
- added field to choose the number of results to return
- default results now 100 instead of 500 (but 500 can still be chosen), this cuts down on the size of the returned document and should be more bandwidth friendly for dialup modem users

Weekly stats have been refreshed/updated, so go check out where your blog compares or feel free to add your blog. There are 754 blogs currently being tracked in the database. As of this writing, BlogCompare has been used 3,875+ times.

What is BlogCompare?
BlogCompare is stats comparison program between blogs which is based on the Blogebrity lists: A-List, B-List, C-List. Upon seeing that listing I wanted to be able to compare blog stats on more than just the opinion of one entity so I scraped the A-B-C lists, dumped into a database, and then added a variety of different sorting and comparison options including blog stats data from Technorati via their API. Also added the option that bloggers that weren’t listed could add their blogs so they could compare stats. Users can check boxes off to choose different bloggers to compare and they will show up in the middle column. In version 3.x Alexa ratings via their API were added for each blog.

All stats updated and the lists resyncronized roughly once per week. The Technorati and Alexa stats do not change any more frequently than that so there is no point in updating/refreshing the stats.

I continue to develop BlogCompare hence the title: “forever beta” and while it is mostly something used for my own comparisons and research, it’s being shared with the rest of the internet. Currently no registration is required to use the stats program but it is being monitored closely for abuse and this may need to change someday. If you have any questions about how to use BlogCompare, run stat comparisons between bloggers, etc, feel free to use the comments or trackback from your blog to this entry and ask away. There is also a step-by-step How To guide for using BlogCompare.

There is an RSS feed for the BlogCompare category here at MakeYouGoHmm, which you can subscribe to and keep up with new versions and stat update notices.

Blog Compare version 0.3 is now available and all blogger stats in the database have been updated and refreshed. This version adds Alexa Rank courtesy of the Amazon Webservices API.

Unfortunately the Alexa Rank for some blogs are unavailable because the main domain hosts more than one blogger like blogspot, livejournal, WeblogsInc, MSN Spaces, Typepad, etc. However, if the blog is hosted on its own domain then you should find a current Alexa Rank and be able to compare these stats as well. Just like the other BlogCompare stats this will be updated no more frequently than once per week on average.

Some pretty interesting comparisons can be made using BlogCompare. There are two new sortable options: Alexa Rank worst to best and best to worst.

v0.3 changelog
- added Alexa Rating stats for sort by comparison
- more minor UI tweaks, it should look better and be easier to read data (see screenshot above)

This week’s blogcompare stats have been updated. If your blog is listed and the stats didn’t change for some reason and they have changed when viewed at Technorati directly, then try updating them manually through the “add/update your blog” link.

As mentioned before, some of the Technorati API stats do not match what is shown in the live site database. Poking around the Technorati API wiki Jonas Luster made a similar comment in the bug reports section:

Near-time calls to cosmos and bloginfo seem to return different rank values.

I probably should write Dave Sifry and see if he knows what’s going on here (wait, maybe by writing this he’ll see the entry and have an answer). My guess is that they don’t update the database used in the API as often as the one in their live database and that’s explains why some blogger’s stats are out of sync. Why some blogs are returning no inbound/outbound stats at all though is a bit puzzling.

Changelog for blogcompare v0.2.1
- add/update form now remembers mistakes (no cookies or sessions required), so no need to re-enter all three fields
- added 5,000 and 10,000+ blog source sort option
- added ‘o’ther list as a sorting option
- some other minor cosmetic changes

Just released version 0.2 of BlogCompare, which adds some more goodies for helping to compare Technorati stats between blogs. These are the changes and additions:

• added minimum source stats with a default of 10 incoming sources - this can be adjusted back to zero in the dropdown menu or up to 2,500+
• added comparison checkboxes - easily compare any group of blogger stats in the database by checking the box next to their name
• colorized and fontified - for easier readability and to make it look a little nicer. Includes the logo shown above with the caption “forever beta” — which follows the current trend.
• added blogcompare category to MakeYouGoHmm - for changelog and instructional posts like this one. Those interested can subscribe to the RSS feed for only this category, just like any other category here (shown as #7 in picture below)

Screenshots and Examples
Let’s say I wanted to compare the blogs stats from some well known bloggers like Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Chris Pirillo and Doc Searls.

Navigate to the BlogCompare homepage. When you first arrive you’ll see a v0.2 screen that looks like this (minus all the red numbers and arrows, of course):

Here are the important numbers explained (1-6):
1 - Sort by field. There are several choices to sort the data by here including blogger name alphabetically (A-Z), reverse alphabetically (Z-A), number of *Inbound Links by the lowest number of links (zero) to highest (low->high) and highest to lowest (high->low), *Inbound Sources by low to high and high to low, *Technorati Cosmos rating by lowest (best) to highest (worst) and highest to lowest and finally a custom BlogCompare quality score which is based in v0.2 on the ratio of links to blogs. A perfect ratio would be 100% which would 1:1 ratio of sources to links. Therefore a blog with lots of links from a lower number of sources would have a lower quality ratio. Note: ‘quality’ doesn’t have anything to do with how good or bad a blog’s content actually is or not.

* these figures come via the Technorati API

2 - List field. The list field provides four choices: Top 500, A-List, B-List, C-List. The A,B,C lists are pulled from Blogebrity’s TheList OPML files and are not chosen by me. Anybody who adds their own blog through BlogCompare, will go on the ‘o’ther list. The ‘o’ther list is sorted within the Top 500 list. In fact when you first visit, currenly there is 1 ‘o’ther blogger listed, 3 C-List bloggers, 4 B-List bloggers and only 1 A-List blogger in the Top 10 with sort by Quality Rank high->low. So it is quite possible to make the default top 10 as an add-in with a relatively small number of sources and links. In this blogger’s case, there was 35 links from 34 sources for a Quality Rank of 94.2857%. #11 is also an ‘o’ther link, added by the blogger.
3 - Minimum Sources. This was added in v0.2 to add some sort of minimum sources threshold to the default Top 500 list. Users can still sort by 0 (the v0.1 default) which means that 0 links / 0 sources can still be viewed. There are options for 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000 and 2500+ sources. By using this option you can limit the list considerably.
4 - View List submit button. Once you’ve selected your comparison or view choices, press this button to run the query.
5 - The Database (Top 500). This section will change based on the dropdown menu choices made. For the least amount of results you could set: quality rank high->low, list: A-List, Minimum Sources: 2500+ and you’d only see 27 of the A-Listers make the cut (as of this writing, anyway).
6 - Comparison area. This is where bloggers you choose by checking the boxes will appear. You can choose any bloggers on the list, so find the ones you want to compare, check the boxes, and then press the View list button and you’ll see these bloggers compared in this area sorted and ranked by the criteria chosen.

Search for the aforementioned bloggers using the Find command in Internet Explorer and Firefox (CTRL + F). Just enter in the last name of all the bloggers mentioned: Scoble, Winer, Pirillo, and Searls.

Now press the “View list” button and look in the Comparisons section (colored cyan in the center) to see the bloggers you’ve chosen stats ranked. You’ll note that the boxes are checked by default in the comparison section so you only need to change the dropdown menus and click “View list” to resort/rank based on the new criteria.

Voila! That’s the easy three step BlogCompare process. If you add your own blog (shown as #8 in the red numbered screenshot) it should appear in the Newly added area just below the Comparisons and then you can compare. You must appear in Technorati and have at Technorati API key (free) to be added to the database. It’s all automated at this point, but if it is abused a moderation queue can easily be added.

If you want to learn more about this experimental tool, then see the original post: Resorting and reordering the Blogebrity A-B-C blogger list

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