Just in case you were pining for yet another Top Blogs list – Bloglines today announced their one the Bloglines Top 1000 (they used to have a Top 200). They report that at the heart of the metric is how many ‘active’ subscribers that a blog has (with some other secret herbs and spices).
One of the nice features with this Top list is that they present a little graph (a “sparkline” – thanks Jorge of the feed (tiny and not really that specific – but handy at spotting a trend) and show it it’s been trending up or down.
Keep in mind that this is just tracking those who use Bloglines to read feeds. This does mean things are ordered a little different to other Top Blog lists.
Interestingly for me the Top 1000 list puts my blog Digital Photography School at #250 on the list – ahead of ProBlogger at #304 – despite ProBlogger having 4000 or so more subscribers. Obviously ProBlogger readers use Bloglines less than other methods.
Anyway – it’s an interesting metric (well for 10 or 15 minutes anyway).
This is really cool! I like the beta version of Bloglines but Google Reader is still too good to change to Bloglines.
Thanks for the info. A nice thing is that you can also see the rank of the feed even if you are not in the top 1000.
Exemple for my own (rank 6716) : http://beta.bloglines.com/b/preview?siteid=1010557
Darren, just to say that the “little graph” is called a “sparkline”, was proposed by Edward Tufte, you can see it, for example, in Google Analytics and is purpose it exactly to show trends, outliers, etc.
That metric is so useless, the bloglines feed reader is not a highly used reader. Maybe i would feel differently if i were on the list. (lol. never mind)
I’m sure the list will go viral, though.
Darren,
Thank you for the info and link, I am fairly new to blogging and up until now I had never heard of Bloglines.
This is one for my Netvibes page.
Regards.
You know what? Reviewing this list can really give you a good visual awareness of the certain topics that are really hot and which ones are not. I plan on reviewing this a lot closer, but for now, thanks for finding it. :)
A top 1,000 list seems a little large to me. When I see a “top anything list” I like to check them all out, but 1,000 is too much to digest at one sitting.
I agree, its difficult. But it sure does make for a good read. There are so many blogs out there, so you almost have to digest a top 1000 to get a good perspective on the general health and awareness of the blogosphere and their respective topics. I truly find this list extremely useful.
I think top 100 would have been a perfect list.
Top 1000 is!!!!
I had a look at the list and I actually found it really confusing. Why is Lifehacker in the list like a dozen times? Do they have a whole bunch of different feeds or something? Also, it didn’t feel accurate at all because many well known blogs were coming up at strange positions in the list so as your other readers pointed out, Bloglines is only used by a section of blog readers, and I think it varies wildly.
Bloglines is encouraging bloggers to use bloglines. I like those Top 1000 … :)
BlogLines is interesting as another RSS aggregator. But except for its top 1000 list, I’m not seeing it as much other than another way for readers to find your topics. Other RSS readers are cleaner (like Google or OWL). But it’s good to “spread the wealth” and make sure that it’s easy for your readers to find you using whatever tools they want to use.
Like Caroline mentioned in an earlier comment, the fact that feeds are duplicated (you can find 5-10 copies of certain ones) just shows how much this is still in beta form. They’re going to have to do more cleanup before it’s really useful.
I use bloglines Darren! :)
Lists. Again more lists. There is a list for everything these days. Lists can teach a lot, yes they can, but they can also be skewed very easy. I pay little attention to lists.
I will be more impressed when there is a Nobel Prize for blogging.
I know of a company who owns more then 2000 blogs. In terms of size(number of blogs) the owners of moguling.com own over 2000 blog and i guess they are one among the largest blog networks and marketers..
I’ll be a long long time before I ever hit one of these lists :P Doesn’t stop me from trying though.