Top edublogs - August 2007
Back in January, when I had been blogging for five months but was still a blogosphere fledgling, I am embarrassed to say that I made a post that purported to present the top 30 edublogs as measured by Technorati rankings. The more time that passed since that post, the more chagrined I became at how laughably naive I was (I only analyzed 66 blogs!). So I decided to try again...
Step 1: Define the size of the education blogosphere
This in itself is a challenging and important task. No one knows exactly how big the education blogosphere is because it’s both dispersed and hidden. Here’s how my two phenomenal research assistants, Jenni Christenson and Eric LeJeune, and I tackled the issue:
- We started with CASTLE’s participant lists from LeaderTalk and our Principal Blogging Project, January’s education blogosphere survey, and the messages I received from my aforementioned January post on top edublogs. This garnered us a few hundred blogs.
- Then Jenni and Eric combed scores of education blogs’ blogrolls. We found over one thousand blogs this way.
- They dug through blogger lists like the ones at Support Blogging, BlogBridge, and ScotEduBlogs and got hundreds more.
- With the gracious assistance of all three organizations, Jenni and Eric scraped blog URLs from November Learning Communities, Edublogs, and Class Blogmeister and found hundreds more.
- In the area that Edublogs uses to communicate with its users, James Farmer posted a link to an online form for us and we got another 224 that way.
- And so on… In other words, we tried to find every list, edublog hosting service, blogroll, etc. that might have new blogs that we hadn’t found yet.
Then we had the joy of finding and eliminating duplicates. Ugh.
Technorati lists 14,854 blogs with a tag of ‘education.’ It lists 23,807 blogs with a tag of ‘school.’ James informed me that Edublogs alone is hosting over 50,000 educator blogs, most of which are private and classroom-oriented. As you’ll see, we didn’t get anywhere near that many URLs.
How many edublogs are there? Over 50,000. How many are in this analysis? Over 3,600.
Step 2: Rank the blogs we found.
This was easier. Jenni and Eric copied each blog URL into the search box at Technorati.com and then entered into our spreadsheet the blog’s Authority (i.e., how many blogs have linked to it over the last 6 months) and Rank (i.e., overall rank among the tens of millions of blogs that Technorati monitors; lower is better). For example, at the time we checked, Patrick Higgins’ blog, Chalkdust, had an authority of 40 and a rank of 153,160. Many blogs had an authority of 0 or had nothing listed at all for either factor.
Step 3: Sort and present the results.
After doing a lot of cleanup (eliminating more duplicates!), we sorted by rank and authority. Here are some example results (click on the images to see the full-size charts)…
As you can see, Inside Higher Ed is the most popular edublog on our list according to Technorati’s Rank feature. Rounding out the top 30 is Infinite Thinking Machine.
If you look at the Authority of the top 204 edublogs, you’ll see the classic long tail distribution. The top blog, Inside Higher Ed, had nearly 2,400 other blogs link to it over the past six months. In contrast, the blogs near the end of this graph only had 45 blogs link to them. About two-thirds (2,542) of the blogs on our list had 0 blogs link to them in the last half year. Only 264 averaged more than 5 external links per month.
Caveats and disclaimers
- Exactly what constitutes an ‘education blog’ is a matter of interpretation. Jenni and Eric looked for blogs by teachers, principals, superintendents, school librarians / media specialists, technology coordinators, education professors, education critics / commentators, and the like. They had to make some tough choices but tried to include anyone that blogged regularly and often about education. If you think they included a blog that shouldn’t be on the list, get in touch.
- As hard as we tried, I’m sure we still missed a bunch of folks. If you’d like to be included in our next analysis (hopefully January 31, 2008), please complete the online form.
- There are many reasons why educators blog and Technorati numbers are just two of many metrics of success. If you’re happy blogging, by all means keep it up! If you’d like more traffic, this list of tips is a good place to start.
- Technorati numbers were compiled over a 2–week period in late July. All blog rankings and authority numbers are approximate and already out of date.
Next steps
If you want to play with the data yourself, download the Excel file. Please link back to this post or send me your findings so I can see what you come up with!
I’d like to do this twice a year, so the next time should be in January 2008. As the list grows bigger, it gets more unwieldy and time-consuming. If you’d like to lend a hand, get in touch. If you have any suggestions for how to expand this analysis or do it differently, please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
8/1 Correction: The data for Education Week, The Fischbowl, and eSchoolNews were erroneously omitted. The two graphs above, as well as the downloadable Excel file, have been updated to reflect the data for these two sites.
Comments
I forgot to say that there are lots of great blogs on this list. I hope you take the time to check some out and discover some new voices!
Posted by: Scott McLeod | August 1, 2007 6:25 AM
Wow! As someone who is new to the field, it gives me a nice big picture of the edu blogosphere.
Will come in handy. Thanks!
Posted by: Carl Zetterlund | August 1, 2007 3:28 PM
Where is the list of 3600 blogs you analyzed? Or is it only in that spreadsheet.
My interpretation is that the cross-link tracking and so forth makes blogs more like usenet groups and mailing lists. Which is not always good. A handful of people dominate the discussion. The people who say the most dominate. Lumping all edubloggers together and ranking them like this reinforces that.
What do the top edubloggers talk about? Twittering, Second Life, Wikipedia, Web 2.0, their travel plans, and of course blogging. It gets old. None of those are a panacea for education.
Posted by: okay | August 1, 2007 6:46 PM
Let me start this comment by saying-- I like and respect Scott. He is even a W&M alum. How could I not like him, we the had the same mentors. But respectfully, I am *over* the focus on ranking.
For example, what happens if your blog is registered as both http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com and http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog and each has a separate ranking and different folks
link to each one?
But that is not my point--
I have read blogs that are popular and yawned at the quality of the post and I have read blogs with one follower and been changed forever by the message.
No disrespect meant, but in my opinion all the hype about ranking is overrated.
Visibility or popularity mean what in terms of improving education, reaching children, and changing lives?
I know in high school often people that were the most popular were not always the people from whom I learned the most. This attention to ranking smacks of the same popularity struggle we all remember from high school. For me, it just isnt important.
I just do not see how a high rank in Technorati correlates with positive educational reform or significant impact upon the profession. Maybe I am missing something?
What is important is giving our students and teachers "voice". We need to focus on helping them develop as communicators and writers, not rankers, so they have a place at the policy table and can help to leave this world better than we found it.
Let's quit focusing on rank and start focusing on impact.
Posted by: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach | August 1, 2007 11:07 PM
Let me start this comment by saying-- I like and respect Scott. He is even a W&M alum. How could I not like him, we the had the same mentors. But respectfully, I am *over* the focus on ranking.
For example, what happens if your blog is registered as both http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com and http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog and each has a separate ranking and different folks
link to each one?
But that is not my point--
I have read blogs that are popular and yawned at the quality of the post and I have read blogs with one follower and been changed forever by the message.
No disrespect meant, but in my opinion all the hype about ranking is overrated.
Visibility or popularity mean what in terms of improving education, reaching children, and changing lives?
I know in high school often people that were the most popular were not always the people from whom I learned the most. This attention to ranking smacks of the same popularity struggle we all remember from high school. For me, it just isnt important.
I just do not see how a high rank in Technorati correlates with positive educational reform or significant impact upon the profession. Maybe I am missing something?
What is important is giving our students and teachers "voice". We need to focus on helping them develop as communicators and writers, not rankers, so they have a place at the policy table and can help to leave this world better than we found it.
Let's quit focusing on rank and start focusing on impact.
Posted by: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach | August 1, 2007 11:08 PM
While a very interesting look into rankings, I agree with you Sheryl as I’m more thankful to Scott for the Excel file with all the wonderful blogs that I've never explored.
In fact, my gut reaction was to begin highlighting those that I've not read, those treasures that have been hidden from me. Finding those treasures has always been one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences.
For instance, there are blogs that weren't rated well but continue to reach me on a level that not only challenges me but forces me to raise my level of understanding -- confused on a higher level :-)
For all those bloggers, thank you for challenging me every day to be a better educator, a better leader, a better technologist, a better person! Don't worry about what the ratings say :-)
Now I'm off to search for lost treasure in this great resource list that you provided. Thanks!
(If I don't return in a few weeks, someone rescue me from the blogosphere)
Posted by: Ryan Bretag | August 1, 2007 11:49 PM
Scott
This is an amazing and interesting piece of work, and I will look through the data and try to find new blogs to look at. But I agree with Sheryl in many respects. Here's what I think:
1. I think Technorati rankings are suspect. It hardly ever picks up my blog, so my ranking is pretty low. That's a t6echnical issue that Technorati is not dealing with. I'm not the only one, as a look at their forum will indicate.
2. "Education" is far too broad a term. Context is all important. Do a search for ICT in Education in any of the major search engines, and my website is on the front page, usually in the top 10. "ICT" is the term used in the UK for educational technology, so the ranking of my site in terms of that search is far more relevant and useful than a Technorati ranking.
3. Quality not quanity.
Posted by: Terry Freedman | August 2, 2007 4:33 PM
When I first started blogging never once did I mention to myself, "OOO I want a high technorati rating!" I'm still suprised and shocked that people read what I have to say and share. I started as a way to reflect on my teaching practices and to learn a little bit about myself. Somewhere in between I've made MANY great friends, both virtually and those that I've had the honor of meeting IRL. All in all I look at it as a thoroughly positive endeavor, one that I would make over and over again if I had to start anew.
Tom
Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages
Posted by: Tom Turner | August 6, 2007 12:01 AM