[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Many of you know that I occasionally try to wrap my head around various aspects of the education blogosphere. In the past I’ve written about hubs and superhubs. I’ve also sometimes attempted to identify and quantify some of the most popular edublogs:

Below is my latest attempt. I made a few changes from last time, which I describe after the table. Authority and rank are from Technorati as of June 2. Clicking on each blog name will take you to its Technorati page.

 


Blog Name

2008
Authority
2008
Rank
1*
apophenia
1,256
1,880
2
Weblogg-ed
897
3,222
3
Joanne Jacobs
798
3,848
4
Stephen’s Web
708
4,581
5*
The Panda’s Thumb
563
6,314
6
2 Cents Worth
559
6,364
7
Cool Cat Teacher Blog
550
6,527
8
Moving At the Speed of Creativity
452
8,585
9
Ewan McIntosh’s edu.blogs.com
434
9,073
10
Students 2.0
415
9,601
11
Dangerously Irrelevant
413
9,650
12
The Fischbowl
402
9,999
13
Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites Of The Day…
292
15,222
14
Beyond School
281
16,003
15
EdTechTalk
255
18,132
16
The Thinking Stick
251
18,485
17*
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
247
18,889
18
CogDogBlog
243
19,288
19
Angela Maiers
241
19,497
20
Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech
233
20,369
21
Techlearning blog
231
20,603
22
elearnspace
231
20,603
23
dy/dan
223
21,531
24
Around the Corner
219
22,034
25
Practical Theory
211
23,110
26
Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy
197
25,258
27
Steve Hargadon
194
25,760
28
Half an Hour
187
27,002
29
k12 Online Conference
180
28,355
30
Mobile Technology in TAFE
179
28,551
31
blog of proximal development
171
30,308
32
HeyJude
168
30,991
33
Blue Skunk
164
31,997
34
The Education Wonks
164
31,997
35
Drape’s Takes
162
32,533
36
Always Learning
162
52,728
37*
The Learning Circuits Blog
157
33,890
38
Remote Access
152
35,296
39
PBS Teachers . Learning.now
151
35,621
40
Eduwonkette
150
35,920
41
So You Want To Teach?
149
58,157
42
Eduwonk
148
36,614
43
Teach42
147
36,964
44
History Is Elementary
145
37,670
45
LeaderTalk
144
38,026
46
Infinite Thinking Machine
137
40,556
47
Creating Lifelong Learners
133
42,160
48
AssortedStuff
131
42,997
49
Connectivism Blog
128
44,360
50
think:lab
122
47,149
51
O’DonnellWeb
121
47,646
52
iterating toward openness
119
48,680
53
Teaching Generation Z
119
48,680
54
Generation YES Blog
112
52,751

Information about the table

  • This time I only included blogs that predominantly post about P-12 education. No higher education blogs. No blogs that are mostly about training, software tools, or other topics with an occasional P-12–related post. No education news channels that happen to have an RSS feed. Just β€˜pure’ P-12 blogs. I was on the fence about four blogs on the chart; those are marked with an asterisk. I included blogs 51 to 54 in case you think those four should not have been included.
  • I gave up monitoring the several thousand blogs on my previous list. There were just too many to catalog and also too many newcomers. There are over 100,000 edublogs!
  • I feel fairly confident about the accuracy of this list. I considered listing the top 100 but was not as confident about blogs 70 to 100 because I kept finding new ones in that range.
  • If I missed you, I’m sorry. Please let me know for next time. If you don’t like or disagree with my selection criteria, feel free to make your own list. It would be interesting to compare yours with this one.
  • The very notion of what constitutes a β€˜top’ edublog is very personal and individual (see, e.g., posts by Stephen Downes and Peter Rock as well as the numerous comments regarding my last two attempts). Also, Technorati has a number of issues, but no one has yet suggested a more viable alternative. There are many, many great blogs not on this list. While a number of people are finding value in the blogs in this table, some excellent writing is occurring on blogs with lower authority. Read and write blogs for your own reasons rather than worrying about the numbers.

Other lists of top edublogs

Other attempts have been made to catalog the top edublogs. Of note are the following:

Some stats on Alltop

Only 19 of the top 50 blogs in the chart above are on Alltop Education. Interestingly, I also discovered that at least 9 of the blogs on Alltop Education have an authority of less than 26, meaning that they have less than one inbound link per week.

Alltop01

Blogs with big gains in authority

Take heart, bloggers who want more readers / links! As the chart below shows, a number of the blogs on this list had large gains in authority over the past 11 months. Some of the top blogs (including Students 2.0, Angela Maiers, and Eduwonkette) didn’t even exist a year ago.

2008authoritygains

Final thoughts

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts or reactions regarding this post. I am deeply honored that so many of you choose to read my blogs, appreciate any and all feedback, and look forward to the conversation!