This must be the worst kept secret since Eve hid a half-eaten apple behind her back when the boss came calling.
Yes, I have, finally, updated the ranked Top 50 Australian Writing Blogs. It has been over a year since the last update due to Technorati completely destroying the ranking system by deciding to change their own ranking methodology to be more exclusive.
While I’ve been tinkering with the list for a little while and struggling to iron out a few bugs, a few people noticed that the page was updated (prematurely) and started announcing the new list. Eeeek. So some of you have already peeked under the wrapping, shaken the box and begun to play with the toys before I was quite ready…
Hey ho. Shows you’re all still keen!
I didn’t expect it to take this long to finalise the list and stamp out the bugs, but my life also took a sharp right turn a few weeks ago (in a good way) which rather distracted me. More on that good news in a future post when I’m able to reveal exactly what I will be doing in 2011 and beyond.
So what has changed?
It took a while to investigate other ways of fairly ranking all the blogs and I finally settled on a Yahoo back links score as a reasonable replacement. Then there was a mad flurry of maths and Excel jigger-pokery to come up with a calculation that seemed representative without completely shaking up the established status quo. The new scoring system relies on percentiles rather than raw scores to better represent your position within the group and reduce the distorting effect of some outlying statistics. This all then gets applied to an equation that gives appropriate weight to each of the various factors and results in a final score out of 100.
Far neater than the long strings of numbers the list previously dealt with – albeit more difficult to set up in Excel!
The new mechanism has meant some up and downward movement on the list for some blogs, but within acceptable margins of error. Ie; your movement on the chart is more likely due to changes with your blog over the last year and less likely due to the change in method.
You can read more on the new system and the equation used to calculate the final scores in the FAQ which also answers many of the other common queries I get regarding the list.
Sadly, a couple of new blogs were submitted for inclusion after I ran the numbers and before this official release of list so they will need to be included in the next update in the New Year. However there are still a large number of new blogs on the list so seek them out, add them to your RSS reader and enjoy!
Also, between last year and this, far more of you have leapt onto Twitter. To make it easier to follow everyone on the list who has a Twitter account, I’ve created a Twitter list with everyone on it. Just visit the list and you should see a button which allows you to follow everyone with one click.
As always, gremlins do creep in so please let me know of any errors you find and also any other suitable blogs that should be included next time. Simply send me the details via my contact form.