The Wikio 'top blogs' for October (which actually means September) were published this morning. Here are the blogs in the top 250 which deal wholly or partly with religious/faith themes. In case any of us are tempted to take ourselves too seriously, all but one of these are outranked by a blog on cupcakes.
16 Archbishop Cranmer
67 Heresy Corner
97 The hermeneutic of continuity (worth a look at this post as an alternative to some of recieved wisdom about the papacy)
123 Gates of Vienna, but I'm not going to link to it.
126 What does the prayer really say?
130 Thinking Anglicans
136 Bartholemew's Notes on Religion
137 St. Aidan to Abbey Manor
162 Anglican Mainstream (for the 50th time, it's not a blog!)
178 Catholic and Loving it! that's their '!', not mine.
200 John Smeaton, SPUC director
202 Islam in Europe
222 The Ugley Vicar
229 Virtue Online (not a UK blog, so still not sure what it's doing here)
240 Of Course I Could be Wrong,
the Wikio blurb says: The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles. I still can't work out why blogs with twice my readership and links in, like Church Mouse, Clayboy, and Bishop Alan, aren't on this list.
The main trends seem to be a general falling off in blogs which focus wholly or partly on Anglican infighting, and the discovery of wikio by parts of the Roman Catholic blogosphere. Some of the first trend could be explained by a good month for cupcakes and home crafts, who could soon be challenging Dale and Guido for the top spots.
in other ranking news......
Church Mouse has his latest list of top twitterers in the CofE, so if you're trying to find out if your vicar is tweeting their sermons, that's the place to go.
Peter Ould has compiled the a list based on the slightly odd Alexa rankings, which has evolved into a top 40, and gives some indication of the breadth of Anglican blogging. Some of the juxtapositions are quite amusing: MadPriest is new into the chart, 1 place above Rowan Williams, or the 'Grand Tufti' as MP likes to call him. He's currently on a recruitment drive amongst Roman Catholics. Don't blame him: see above.
Unlike the two chaps above, I don't bother doing original research, I just crib from someone elses!!
I'm slipping further down - 787 this month. I'll blame it on the cupcakes and crafts!
ReplyDeleteI confess to not understanding how any rankings work. I assume length of time a blog has been around might also contribute. I understand the Alexa rankings least of all. FWIW I note that Mouse is climbing into the 300s, while I'm climbing into the 400s. We have some way to go before joining you among Wikio's elite, and I have some way further to go than His Mouseness. Currently, when rankings get posted, I remind myself that I blog for fun and not for glory. I'm sure that if I climb higher I shall appear to forget that.
ReplyDeleteWhilst Wikio's ranking system does seem to be the most robust, Mouse has noted no correlation with the number and strength of links he has received. Mouse has been linked to by Ruth Gledhill, Archbishop Cranmer, Iain Dale and a number of other top bloggers, yet his Wikio ranking doesn't seem to move in response to these (albeit it only moves on a monthly basis). Alexa rankings bear absolutely no relation to the stats Mouse gets from Google Analytics, so he doesn't trust Alexa at all.
ReplyDeleteCranmer has an interesting piece on how he thinks MessageSpace distorts the Wikio rankings (http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2009/09/blog-ranking-and-messagespace.html) - Mouse suspects there are other distortions too, but nevertheless it is probably the most robust ranking available.
Alexa is based on statistics gathered by people using the Alexa toolbar... do you know anybody who has one of those? Thought not.
ReplyDeleteYou can whack yourself quite a way up Alexa just by getting yourself and your friends to install the toolbar and set your site as the homepage.
Because the Alexa toolbar tends to come bundled with new computers and software, the stats tend to be an indication of what people who are not particularly computer literate are reading (because people who *are* computer literate remove it).
Mouse
ReplyDeleteIt may just be time; Wikio uses 12 months of results.