Frequently Asked Questions

1. "Why did you create the list?"

I love blogs and I love writing. By producing a (hopefully) comprehensive list of writers - both amateur and pro - who blog, it will encourage networking and benefit everyone on the list. Blogs cannot be solitary. Like a partygoer, you get nowhere standing in the corner talking to yourself. Consider this the ultimate writer's party mixer.

With writers sharing their advice and experiences, ideas and observations with each other, everyone can learn from the wider blogging community. This will hopefully become a valuable resource for writers new and old, to find fellow thinkers and network. It is for this reason the list is restricted to blogs on the act of writing and not blogs about books or literature. This list is for writers, not readers or critics, although writers do enjoy discussing these things as well.

2. "How is the list calculated? What are all those numbers?"

The formula for ranking these blogs comes from the three most commmonly used methods of blog tracking; Technorati, Google PageRank and Alexa rankings.

Technorati, for those of you unfamiliar, is a free online service that ranks blogs based on the number of other blogs linking back to them. Therefore it rewards blogs for their influence on the wider blog community in sparking conversation. As this is a highly important goal for a blog, it is given the highest weighting in the final score. As the maximum Technorati rating currently possible is just under 5,000,000, a blog that has yet to acquire a Technorati rank was defaulted to 5,000,000. If this includes your blog, I suggest registering and listing your blog with Technorati. This will start your blog rising through the ranks and will improve your standing in future Top 50 lists.

The second score is PageRank - a Google number out of ten given as a guide of the relative importance Google assigns to a webpage or site. Based on the number of links and the popularity of the keywords used within, PageRank helps a webpage appear within the Google results. PageRank is not seen as a major source of influence or achievement these days, so I have given it a lower weighting in the scores. This I have done by using the equation 50,000 X (10-PR). This gives a score of 500,000 for a blog with 0 PR all the way up to a score of 0 for a blog with PR 10 - one tenth of the weighting given to the Technorati and Alexa ranks.

The third and final score is given equal weighting to Technorati. This is the Alexa ranking, assessing a website's traffic numbers and placing websites in order from 0 to just under 30,000,000. Again, those blogs yet to acquire an Alexa ranking defaulted to a rank of 30,000,000. The more traffic a website receives over time, the lower the Alexa score. To provide the same wieghting as Technorati, it was necessary to divide the Alexa score by 6 to provide a figure between 1 and 5,000,000.

This means that the maximum score a blog can receive is 10,500,000, with the top blogs being those with the lowest ranking overall.

So the final equation used is as follows;

Technorati score + (500,000 x (10-PR score)) + (Alexa score / 6) = final score.

3. "How do you define a blog? There are plenty of writer websites not included."

A blog must have a few things.

• The ability to subscribe via RSS or another appropriate method.
• Allow readers to leave comments, interacting with the posts
• Regularly updated content in a journal or article format.

Some blogs I have come across are not actually blogs, but are websites manually updated without the use of a blogging platform. As these invariably fail to have the first two of the above features, I haven't included them.

4. "I have a blog on writing but it isn't included. What do I do?

Please send me the details through the contact form and I will include the blog at the next scheduled update. When submitting, it is a good idea to check your blog is registered and claimed at Technorati, as this will dramatically improve your chances of appearing high on the list instead of way down the bottom when you first appear.

Also include a two or three word description of yourself and the blog - for example; romance novelist, or copywriting, or aspiring screenwriter, etc. if you have a Twitter account, include your Twitter name.

5. "What makes a blog eligible?"

The blog has to be by a writer - either amateur or professional. Whether you are a published novelist or an unpublished poet, a marketing copywriter or a struggling screenwriter, if you write about your experiences getting words onto paper, then you're in.

This does not include literary review blogs or the plethora of sites devoted to recommending books and interviewing writers. As these blogs are written by and for readers - not writers - they don't fit the definition I've laid out. I know some people would debate me on this, but it would a) dilute the list significantly to include literature, library and other book sites, impacting the visibility of otherwise deserving writer blogs; and b) divert from discussions from how we write to what we read.

The blog also has to have been updated within the last three months. This will mean inactive blogs will drop off future updates, maintaining a vibrant and current list. Three months is definitely too long for most people to leave a blog untouched, but some people do have busy lives, book tours and other things that can get in the way, so this seemed a fair time scale.

Not every post has to be about writing, but there should be a reasonable smattering of them among the other observations and commentaries. This is particularly important if you aren't a published writer. Saying that you're an aspiring novelist in your bio but only ever writing about your cats won't keep you on the list. I will be more lenient with published or professional writers as the list benefits from including them - but in most cases these writers would cover their experiences in publishing or producing new work anyway.

6. "Is there a badge I can place on my blog to show off the list to my readers?"

If you want to display your award on your blog, you can with this convenient 125x125 panel that links back to this chart. Just cut and paste the following code into your blog sidebar and let your readers know how successful your blog is.

7. "How can I improve my blog's ranking?"

The element that you have most influence over is the Technorati score. Some blogs have dramatically improved their rankings merely by registering and claiming their blogs, gaining a score for all the inbound blog links their blog has already achieved.

Once you have a Technorati account, it is important to network with other blogs, sharing links and commenting on each other's posts. When other blogs link to your content, your Technorati score grows, improving your overall ranking.

Of course, more inbound links can also improve your Google PageRank and - by attracting more traffic - may also boost your Alexa ranking. Alexa is determined by monitoring the number of visitors to your website that have the Alexa toolbar installed, and then extrapolating from that ratio an estimate of the percentage of international web traffic that visits your blog. That percentage then helps create a ranking. Installing the Alexa toolbar can help improve your score, but the goal is to attract more traffic.

8. "My favourite blog is not included. Are you insane?"

Nope, but I'm not omnipotent either.

If the blog truly fits the above criteria - and not all blogs submitted to me do - it may be that I have yet to discover that particular blog through any of the channels I've used to collate this list. The idea of this list is to help provide exposure and lead other interested writers to find the gems hidden within these blogs. If a particular blog has not been recommended to me, doesn't appear in common Google searches and hasn't crossed my path in my everyday online activities, it makes it very hard to find, classify and include it. Hopefully, this list will help correct that.

9. "Blog XYZ is definitely better than blog ABC, but is lower on the list. This list is therefore bogus and you are a poo-poo-head who can't recognise quality when he sees it."

To avoid complaints of bias - and allegations of poo-poo-head, ignoramus, philistine and others - there is no subjective 'judging' of the blogs on the list. All the scores are produced entirely from established and recognised blog / website ranking systems; Technorati, Alexa and Google PageRank. Some people may believe that a particular blog is more 'worthy' than another, but these scores are the best measure of true online influence. The best writer blog around cannot be deemed successful if no one is reading it or no blogs feel the content is worth linking to.

10. "How often will the list be updated?"

The plan is to update the list every three months - March, June, September and December. However, if there is significant activity, a lot of new blogs to include or a PageRank update, interim updates may occur, time allowing.

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