29 July 2006

B4L Real Top 10 Blogs (by average recommendations per post).

Mars Hill has been publishing the B4L top ten blogs based on total number of recommendations, but that doesn't take into account the number of posts that a blog is producing. A better measure of the top blogs IMHO (it is just a mere coincidence that my blog jumps from 23rd to 10th under this measurement) is to take an average of recommendations per post.

Here is my top blogs (with Mars Hill's rating in brackets). It gives a totally different impression of the top blogs and makes much more sense in terms of the quality of blog writing rather than being skewed by the quantity of blog writing;

1 (1) Labour Humanists: 2.63 (mean recommendations per post)
2 (30) Dirty Leftie: 2.25
3 (42) Oxford Labour Party: 2.00
4 (11) Pootergeek: 1.77
5 (21) Antonia Bance: 1.75
6 (17) Some day I will treat you good: 1.7
7 (20) Let's Be Sensible:1.67
8 (28) Leighton Andrews: 1.66
9 (49) Ministry of Agitation and Propaganda: 1.66
10 (23) BrightonRegencyLabourParty: 1.63
11 (16) The Poor Mouth: 1.54
12 (17) Bloggers4Labour: 1.54
13 (11) Bob Piper: 1.53
14 (5) Ministry Of Truth: 1.39
15 (26) Luke's Blog: 1.38
16 (7) Skuds Sister's Brother: 1.32
17 (14) Mars Hill: 1.31
.
Others outside of the top spots:

(21) Baggage Reclaim: 1.27
(9) Harry's Place: 1.24
(4) wongablog: 1.23
(8) Jo's Journal: 1.17
(2) Kerron Cross: 1.16
(6) Take back the voice: 1.15
(11) Mike Ion: (missing info)
(10) Fourth Term: (missing info)
.
Joint Last, (3) normblog: 1.00 (among many)

Undisputed king of B4L blogs is Labour Humanists, no matter how it is measured. Notice how Normblog drops from third to joint last with the lowest possible score of 1.00! This average method has the merit of reducing the impact of those bloggers who boost their own vote by writing a huge number of posts and then voting for themselves (come on own up?), (or only have one admirer per post).

By the way, I was only counting posts that have received at least 1 recommendation, a more accurate top 20 would be to take into account all blog posts. If anyone has more time and interest than me...

*UPDATE* B4L has informed me that a few blogs (with lots of 2 vote posts) may have slipped through my calculations. So let me know if your blog has an average of over 1.5 per post. Next time I will also mention the number of posts that the average is worked out from.

10 comments:

  1. That's interesting. Would have been nice to have a count of the number of posts since the voting started (though I have voted for a couple of Norm posts I remember from way back), but that would have been very hard to work out manually.

    BTW, FourthTerm and Mike Ion are 'different' because their feed links to the top of their blog, not the actual post, so we can't count votes for the individual posts (unless you use the Firefox/Greasemonkey thing).

    I'll look over the fact that B4L 'itself' scores 1.54 - good enough for 11th place! :-)

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  2. Yeah, you are right B4L (and probably a few others) should be in there. I have missed a few blogs because I did all the ones that were in the Mars Hill top ten or so, and then all the blogs that had posts with over 3 votes. There are probably a couple of blogs with lots of 2 vote posts that I've missed, like yours, I will duly correct that.

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  3. I could just update the Recommendations page (or add another page somewhere) to get all the values straight from the database. Will do if I get some time.

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  4. Oh right, yeah that would be good if you have time.

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  5. Well, all I can say is that I much prefer this rating system. Go DirtyLeftie! ;)

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  6. matt: Yeah, a jump from 30th place to 2nd is pretty impressive!

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  7. Neil, congratulations on making the top 10!

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  8. I am careful about my rating. For example I try to point out when I mention the Top Ten, that this is in no way indicative of the overall popularity of each blog

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  9. Paul: I know these ratings are a bit iffy whichever way you measure it, because the number of votes is still statistically small.

    snafu: Cheers. I had to fiddle it a bit but I found a way of getting there.

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  10. Everythings great, except one thing. Where is Matthew On...?

    To view my blog, just click me name at the top of this post and then the blog link. Look forward to seeing you, and hopefully being on the list.

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