I just received the following letter from the President of Blogniscient explaining how The Jawa Report became the Top Conservative Blog for a day. Those interested in the methodology of ranking blogs might be interested in how Blogniscient differs from other ranking systems. Begin letter
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Congratulations on making the #1 Conservative Political blog yesterday on
Blogniscient and thank you for posting about Blognisceint on "The Jawa Report".

As the president of Blogniscient, I wanted to give you a little insight on the
blog rankings presented by Blogniscient. Most blog rankings you see through
Technorati or Feedster are basically static rankings which are only updated
every few months. Blogniscient's rankings, however, are updated continuously
to represent the state of the Blogosphere at the current time.

Blogniscient's algorithms work by examining blog content (i.e. blog posts).
Each blog post is indexed and continually re-evaluated and scored to capture
how the information in a particular post is propagating and affecting discourse
throughout the Blogosphere.

In ranking the actual blogs (as opposed to the blog post scoring discussed
above), Blogniscient takes the position that a blog is basically the sum of its
content. Therefore, Blogniscient aggregates the scores of all of the blog posts
from a particular blog as the score for the blog. The scores are then compared
to create the rankings on a category-by-category basis.

This approach has the advantage that it is extremely dynamic and more accurately represents the true state of the Blogosphere. Consider the case where a particular blog is not even in the top 10. Now assume that the blogger breaks a particularly important story which everyone is talking about. It is quite
possible that that blog may reach the #1 spot. Conversely, if one of the top
bloggers goes on vacation for a week and doesn't keep up with their blog, it is
unlikely that they will stay in the top 10 for very long.

Thank you again for posting about Blogniscient. I hope that this explanation
gives you some insight into how our rankings are created and maintained.......

Thanks,
Ben Ruedlinger, PhD
President, Blogniscient, Inc.
http://www.blogniscient.com

Posted by: Rusty at 01:11 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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