Thanks again,
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net

P.S. I’ve slipped in the Technorati rankings. I’m not as authoritative as I once was. Sigh.

And, Miguel, I still read you religiously!

Laughing,
miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner
http://mguhlin.net

I have only really gotten into – ok, immersed myself in! – edublogging since about February of this year and it has escalated exponentially in the past month or so with the bit more free time on my agenda that summer brings. I find myself swimming in blogs to read, reply to, and track. There are certain blogs that I keep returning to and others that I forget about.

Staying with the water imagery…the effect that each element has within a complex system is very much like a drop of water in a pool: it ripples out to eventually affect other parts of the system, whether we are conscious of it or not. I think that the extent to which one, in our system, blog affects another depends on how close to a hub each blog is.

For example, I found out about the dy/dan’s 4 slide contest through Scott’s blog, which in turn I had found through someone else’s blog a few months ago. I had never read Dan’s blog before this contest, but because of Dangerously Irrelevant’s stickiness I return to it and found the contest. I honestly don’t remember the blog that brought me here, but without it I may not have found Scott’s blog and in turn may not have found out about Dan’s contest. So, even though I can not remember that original blog that brought me here, it was important and certainly affected this system.

Phew – confusing…no…complex

Well written Scott! There are several points you made with which I find myself in agreement, but I can’t ignore the fact that by nature of the tools, ranking theory is flawed.

Alexa, the site popularity and ranking measurement metric, and well known Technorati are both biased for many reasons cited by many experts. Here is one such recap– http://www.clappingtrees.com/archives/2007/03/perspective4-of-alexa-dmoz-technorati/

Let’s assume for all the reasons you list that ranking is important to study. Technorati, in my opinion, simply provides a lousy basis for accurately ranking blogs.

For example, with Technorati, while it works somewhat as a collaborative ranking system, only site owners who create a link to other sites get a say as to what blogs are popular — site readers (who don’t own a blog) don’t have any way to have their voice heard.

Even if Technorati was a dependable tool that ranked consistently, I would have problems with the survey data in terms of the reliability of the ‘random’ sample. Technorati users are a pretty small percentage of web users, and certainly aren’t representative of the readers of most of the sites and blogs that I read.

Another issue in using Technorati as “the” tool to determine impact is that if you’ve had a blog for any amount of time and have moved URLs for any reason, Technorati seems incapable of re-grouping URLs for a single blog. Additionally, as in my case, Technorati picks my blog up as two different URLs, with significantly different rankings, (35,790 vs 26,639) each having unique links. This is the exact same blog, with the exact same content.

There is a ton of duplication between the two and thusly my blog is pretty much just broken up into two pieces which certainly must make it hard for anyone trying to assess the overall reaction to my writing over the past 2 years. According to Technorati’s FAQ “We are unable transfer or combine links from different URLs at this time.”

Also, when you look at the blogs that link to you in Technorati you will notice that a pretty high percentage of those listed are your own posts. (just a quick look at your blog Scott showed 4 of the 20 posts on the first two pages of blogs linked to you were your own posts.) I don’t know what’s going on here but as the basis of “blog popularity” this data seems pretty suspect to me.

Some even feel there is a There’s a MOVEMENT out there to fool Technorati!
http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com/2007/07/ethical-blogging.html

I think what really shaped my thinking on ranking was my daughter’s experience and as an outcome- rank doesn’t “blur” or correlate to impact for me.

When a 24 year old’s post on spices and cupcakes can push her blog to a higher rank than the substantive posts by Will and David something is wrong with the system. I blogged about it here:
http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/does_traffic_ma.html

All that said… visibility and exposure is important if what you are saying has the ability to provoke positive reform, as obviously your writing does Scott. Thanks for adding to the thinking on a topic that needs much more study to fully understand the outcomes.

However, a point of clarification–
You said, “Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach advocates focusing on impact, not just ranking. To me, impact and ranking tend to blur since I think about large-scale, comprehensive reform of schools, not just localized change.”

For the record, most of my day-to-day work with CTQ and other clients is spent on policy work that has national impact, so I share and appreciate your large scale comprehensive perspective. You can check out the work I do here- http://www.21stcenturycollaborative.com/projects.html

Dr. Jan

On another note, I know you’re working toward systemic change too (we all thank you!). I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t. Sorry if my post read that way.