As you may know, AdAge is now housing and maintaining the Power 150, a compilation of the top marketing and media blogs. Of course, these days they go much further down the Long Tail than 150, even including this blog, which currently ranks at #504. (Hey, I'm proud and happy to be on the list!)
AdAge Editor, Jonah Bloom, sent a letter today announcing some changes to the list. These include the addition of Alexa site rankings and a reduction in the importance of weight given to Bloglines.
If you'd like to read Jonah's letter, read on.
Dear Blogger,
Since we agreed to house and maintain Todd Andrlik's Power 150 this summer, we've been looking for ways to make it better and more useful. We added some badges that you could put on your site to show your ranking on the Power 150, we added an OPML file of the blogs on the list so that anyone who wanted to could track new entries across the 'sphere, and we expanded the list as requests to join flooded in--there are more than 500 blogs today.
Last week, after some serious thought and code tinkering, we introduced a new metric to make the index more dynamic on a week-to-week basis and provide what we hope will be a more accurate picture of the marketing and media blogoverse. With Google PageRank, Bloglines and Technorati, we already consider feed subscriptions and in-bound links, but so far we haven't had a way to assess good old page views or total web reach. We've now added Alexa's site rankings to allow us to estimate how many people are actually visiting a blog in a web browser, an important -- although imperfect -- measure of a site's popularity. We'll be grabbing the rankings daily and scaling each of them down to a number out of 30, which will then be totaled into the new 100-point total score.
To do so, we've reduced the importance of Bloglines subscribers by five points (now on a 15-point scale), an acknowledgment--as many of you have pointed out to us--that Bloglines is no longer the most popular web-based RSS reader, and thus should not have as much weight in the Power 150. Many of you have asked why we don't use Google Reader stats; we'd love to, because it is unquestionably the most popular web-based feed reader and offers the best sample-size for blog subscriptions, but unfortunately there is no API available to the public. As you will see http://adage.com/power150 the new system vaulted Copyblogger to the top of the rankings, and pushed longtime leader Seth Godin into second.
We hope that you will agree with us that Alexa is a good addition to the Power 150, but we also know that our work doesn't stop here. We were recently accused by one blogger, in some rather over-the-top terms (but I'm biased), of "hoodwinking" you. I don't know what we've promised that we've reneged on, but in case any of you feel similarly I want to stress that that was never our intention and I'm happy to hear what we've done wrong. Our aims were, and are, to make sure the Power 150 continues to be a useful ranking for all of you and a useful service for our readers--a blogroll with benefits, if nothing else; we wanted to build on Todd's good work and take a high-maintenance project off one man's hands. We also admitted that we hoped we'd attract a bit of traffic to our site and get a few links, albeit I'd stress that with more than 700,000 registered users of our site and thousands of links a week, the Power 150 project was more something we thought would be a useful service than something we thought would revolutionize our own traffic patterns.
Still, we want to and will do more. We're currently looking at ways to pull out and highlight some of the content on your blogs on the site, either via some editors' picks every week, or perhaps via an automated system. And we will be doing some quickfire Q&As with some of you too, so that you can learn a bit more about the bloggers behind the blogs. But we're open to hearing other ideas. If you want to, feel free to e-mail me, or the guy who actually maintains the Power 150 now, Charlie Moran, or both of us.
Hope that keeps you up to speed and look forward to hearing your thoughts,
Jonah Bloom
Editor
Advertising Age
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