I’m flattered that Little Miss Attila thinks so highly of this site, but even if I thought that this list of the supposed top 100 political blogs made any coherent sense, ML still wouldn’t be on it. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have some influence in this field; I’m a major contributor and site moderator for RedState, which is one of the top 100 political blogs. But RS isn’t ML.
Not that I take the aforementioned list seriously, anyway. If I understand this correctly, the rankings are chosen via a combination of: a). outbound links from RSS feeds and b). Wikio’s internal rankings of the blogs in question, modified by ‘freshness.’ Translation: if you get linked to a lot by blogs with high Wikio ranks whose RSS feeds allow HTML, you’re well on your way to being one of Wikio’s top 100 bloggers. If not, well, Wikio will be happy to encourage you to behaviors that will enhance your Wikio score.
Personally, I would be worried if ML was on this list: the traffic for this site is about what I’d expect from the linkages that I get. If I got enough links from high-ranked blogs to put me on the top 100 list, but wasn’t getting their traffic, I’d be forced to conclude that none of the readers from those sites were actually clicking through; they were just reading the summaries/excerpts and moving on. I don’t mind that so much from the Other Side – I more or less disagree with RS McCain’s Rule 4; starting a fight with a Left-sphere blogger is almost never worth the usually miniscule traffic – but it’d be alarming coming from mine.
All that being said: I have no idea why Politico isn’t on that list. By Wikio’s own rules – flawed as they might be – it should be in the top ten.
We also lose sight of something else. For instance, I write for three of the top 50 on that list (NewsBusters, StopTheACLU, RedState), but what does that mean exactly in relation to eyeballs?
Well, last month on NewsBusters I had about 150,000 hits on my stories there. If I add the other sites I am on we are talking maybe 400,000 readers total.
And, while that is a good number, it doesn’t even come close to the lowest rated cable channels which themselves don’t come close to the Network news stats which themselves aren’t but a tiny percentage of the total number of Americans.
In other words, we are reaching such a tiny percentage of our countrymen that it almost makes the effort seem a waste of time!
Yeah, moan and groan, I know.
But, here is something to brighten your outlook. The people we DO reach are movers and shakers as well as news makers and we are in a far better place than ever to guide public perception.
So, in the end, it IS worth the effort.
It’s possible that I was having a subjective moment, there. But you’re my favorite not-huge blog right now, and there were so many on that list that were just . . . politically destructive, and *worse,* badly written.
/Hermione Granger
Ooooooh… Maxfield Parrish! 2 of his prints hang in my house.
Okay that was not my point but I couldn’t let it go without a commnet.
That poll seems really skewed to me. Kinda heavy on the left. RedState should certainly been higher, as well as HotAir. I post at neither but I read at both. Both excellent blogs.