Tags: Society, Website, WordPress
Cor Blimey Guv
February 20th, 2006, by Rich.
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Would you Adam and Eve it, we’re at number 2 in the BritBlog top 50. Cor blimey! Love a duck!
Perhaps it’s got something to do with the Wordpress plugins I’ve written (AutoMeta, Analytics and MostWanted); these tend to generate a fair bit of traffic, because they are quite popular among a diverse cross section of the planet’s population. It’s also probably got something to do with the continuing popularity of the Ameri-scam articles which have somehow ended up helping many hundreds of people who’ve fallen prey to telemarketers. It’s also got something to do with my occasional posts about Google - they are surprisingly popular.
Up until last week we were sitting at around #49 (out of the 4020 listed blogs) in the BritBlog rankings, but thanks to Mark’s (who run’s BritBlogs) decision to switch to a traffic based alogrithm for blog ranking we’ve hit the top-10 with some gusto.
What is popularity anyway?
I’m still not convinced that traffic is a particularly good overall measure of popularity, as I’ve previously mentioned (oh, the irony) on Mark’s BritBlog Blog. I think traffic ranking helps ensure honesty, but it’s full of caveats.
What I’m really getting at is “what is popularity anyway?”. Is it this website site that’s popular or the software that helps other people with their sites? How can the middle ground be measured when, this website, after all, is a mixture of opinion and code? I suppose that’s part of the quandy of blogging, it’s a pot-pourri.
A top-n of anything on the web is a strange thing: websites are popular with their readership because they fulfill a role, so if you don’t fit into the group of people for whom the site is useful, then there’s a very low probability that visiting any site just because it’s popular will provide you with any worthwhile content - people in general are just too diverse.
In Defense of Ranking
The real benefit to having a set of rankings is when they’re combined with other services, a - for example - a search engine that takes account of page popularity are more likely to provide relevant contemporary results.
Patriotism Follows
Notwithstanding these reservations, right now we’re delighted to be at number two in the British rankings, exporting quality British Built Code to the rest of the world, supporting the open-source movement, and generally helping folk enjoy a better internet.
Time to celebrate; I’m off to the corner shop to buy a Kazoo and a small plastic Union Flag.
February 20th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
After the earlier excitement of being #2 we’ve now dropped down to number 4 - I wonder if it’s because I altered the image code to remove the XHTML-breaking border="0"?
February 27th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Now we’ve disappeared out of the Top-50 altogether, perhaps some jiggery and pokery is afoot with the ranking algorithm.
February 28th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
…and now we’re back up to number 5… passengers are advised to keep their seatbelt fastened at all times whilst the rankings are in motion.
November 11th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
Now we’re outside the top 200, whilst other sites that are certainly “less popular” are riding high… come on technoranki, settle down and publish the algorithm.