The Blogosphere Power Rankings -- The Most Popular Political Blogs On The Net
By John Hawkins
Regular readers of RWN will remember that back in January, I did an article that got a lot of play called, "100 Of The Most Popular Political Websites On The Net ". What a lot of you probably don't know is that originally I planned to just rank the blogs in that article and only later did I decide to rank all political websites.
Well, I thought the time was right to go ahead and do what I set out to do -- see which political blogs are the most popular. Of course, there are a number of inherent difficulties in doing that sort of thing. You have to decide what counts as a blog -- for example, are websites like Fark & Counterpunch actually blogs (I say "no")? Then there was the issue of sorting "political blogs" out from other types of blogs like Boing Boing & Wil Wheaton's page. Some of them were tough calls, but I made my decisions and decided to let the chips fall where they may. Also, I had to try to make sure I took a look at all the top political blogs on the left and right. I may have missed a few, but I spent almost two hours compiling a list of every popular blog I could think of from links & ranking services across the net. Some of the pages I perused to compile this list included, EZ Bear's Ecosystem, Daypop, Technorati, Blogstreet, & Blogrolling.
So after I compiled a list of blogs, I had to rank them. I decided to use Alexa for that purpose. However, Alexa does have some flaws.
-- Alexa can't properly read all the Blog*spot pages so they all receive the same rank. Because of that, none of them were included.
-- Furthermore, Alexa sometimes cannot distinguish between the main page and secondary page of a website. For example, Alexa gives National Review the same ranking as The Corner which meant I had to leave out a few blogs of worth that were hosted on much larger pages.
I'd estimate that those two factors probably knocked out a good 7 or 8 blogs that would have otherwise been ranked. Furthermore, some of the ranks have changed slightly since I recorded their ranks yesterday. Do keep that in mind as well.
As far as the scoring goes, all 50 websites are listed with their Alexa rank following their link. So for example, a "1" would mean the page was the most popular website on the net. A "100,000" would mean the 100,000th most popular page on the net. With that being said, let's go ahead and take a look at the rankings...
1) Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish: 7,203
2) Instapundit: 9,228
3) Poynter Institute: 9,973
4) James Lileks: 14,740
5) Little Green Footballs: 14,740
6) Talking Points Memo: 19,193
7) The Agonist: 19,444
8) The Smirking Chimp: 21,486
9) The Command Post: 24,233
10) Daily Kos: 26,404
11) The USS Clueless: 29,934
12) Blogs Of War: 35,245
13) Dean's World: 36,210
14) Scrappleface: 36,277
15) Howard Dean for America: 37,052
16) Lt. Smash: 37,486
17) Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store & Reading Room: 39,903
18) Right Wing News: 42,802
19) This Modern World: 43,879
20) Maxspeak: 49,274
21) Nick Denton: 55,259
22) Stand Down: 57,756
23) Buzz Machine: 58,426
24) Matthew Yglesias: 59,599
25) The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: 59,935
26) Taegan Goddard's Political Wire: 61,223
27) The Truth Laid Bear: 62,166
28) Spinsanity: 63,680
29) Matt Welch: 68,220
30) Talk Left: 72,312
31) Cold Fury: 72,485
32) Oliver Willis: 72,774
33) Samizdata: 75,067
34) Warblogs:CC: 75,182
35) Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing: 75,195
36) A Small Victory: 76,482
37) Vodkapundit: 80,019
38) Ken Layne: 82,306
39) Moxie: 82,688
40) Virginia Postrel: 89,783
41) Asymmetrical Information: 90,134
42) Winds Of Change: 90,308
43) Rachel Lucas: 97,302
44) Rantburg: 99,742
45) Overlawyered: 104,341
46) Tacitus: 107,176
47) Amish Tech Support: 109,438
48) Gary Hart: 118,274
49) The Volokh Conspiracy: 136,650
50) Unqualified Offerings:136,929
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