Ranking the Top Technology Blogs

The same principles of correlating high betweenness of Web sites with its popularity can also be applied to blogs. By combining the blogposts collected from different blogs, and collecting the most between sites those posts are linking to, we can extract the most talked-about Web sites and posts.

Figure 11 displays the results of coolhunting for technorati’s 10 most popular blogs (as of Aug 20, 2006:
1. http://www.boingboing.net
2. http://www.43folders.com
3. http://www.techcrunch.com
4. http://www.lifehacker.com
5. http://www.cybernetnews.com
6. http://www.engadget.com
7. http://www.micropersuasion.com
8. http://www.alistapart.com
9. http://scobleizer.wordpress.com
10. http://googleblog.blogspot.com

The first amazing result is that 3 blogs not on Technorati’s top ten list beat them easily by betweenness: google.blognewschannel.com, www.techmeme.com and slashdot.org are all more central. Those three Web sites are all so-called Meme-trackers, trying to discover and rank the most popular new Blog posts, either by displaying manually submitted posts in the case of Slashdot, or by user voting in the case of blognewschannel, or fully automatic ranking by techmeme.

Figure 11. Most popular blogs by coolhunting

As figure 11 shows, the ranking of Technorati and by degree-of-separation search and betwenness produce quite similar results, with a few notable exceptions. BoingBoing, TechCrunch, and Scobleizer would all by degraded by at least 4 ranks. While those three Blogs contain interesting gossip about technology and gadgets, the more highly ranked Web sites 43folders, lifehacker, cybernetnews, and engadget all contain tips and tricks to make digital life easier, by posting novelty product reviews and recommendations about the latest technology and gadgets, with much less gossip than the three underperformers by betweennesss.

The collected blog posts can be used to analyze the contents of the three top ranked tech meme trackers Slashdot, TechCrunch, and Digg. A concept map can be generated by extracting the top-ranked terms for each blog (figure 12). Slashdot, TechCrunch, and Digg show surprising similarity.

Figure 12 Most significant terms on Slashdot, TechCrunch, and Digg

As the focus of these three blogs is the discussion of the latest technology trends, terms such as “Yahoo”, “Google”, “Microsoft”, “Apple”, and “Linux” occupy a central position. There are differences in the discussion of the most central gadgets, however. Slashdot is focusing on iPod, Digg is talking about the Cybershot, and TechCrunch is hyping the not yet as well-established Chumby and Wablet tech gadgets.