There is a blog-ranking service operated by a company called Wikio. Every so often they publish a ranking of the best political blogs which leads to much anguish and ranting about bias (etc) within the political sphere.
They have now expanded their categories to include some new areas, probably hoping that they can gain the same level of controversy and introspective ranting on other blogs. The business case being that lots of blogs discussing a ranking system is good publicity for the ranking system.
Although the company vehemently denies this, and has gone to more than usual efforts to explain its latest rankings, I can only conclude that the newly formed London ranks are deliberately designed to engender the private head scratching that has occurred since it was published last week.
Unlike the political sphere though, the London bloggers haven’t been at each others throats snarling about who moves up or down, probably because frankly, we are a rather more laid back community and tend to like each other too much to care about who is deemed best by a dubious ranking system.
The only comments I will make is to be utterly bemused by the alleged “most London of London blogs”, which is a European architecture website that hardly ever mentions London. The spelling of “Diamind Geezer” raises an eyebrow.
In order to remove some of the rather dubious rankings they have come up with, I will list the alleged top-20 blogs, but will discard their ranking of who is best/worst and will list them in purely alphabetical order.
You may make up your own minds about which of the below London blogs are the ones you think to be the best.
- 853
- Baroque in Hackney
- Brockley Central
- dezeen (the non-London architecture blog)
- diamind geezer
- Going Underground’s Blog
- HOOKED
- IanVisits
- London Reconnections
- Londonist
- LondonNet
- MayorWatch
- Spitalfields Life
- The Blackheath Bugle
- The Great Wen
- The Greenwich Phantom
- The London Foodie
- Tired of London, Tired of Life
- Transpontine
- Visit London Blog
Do love all the London blogs – would definitely like to see more of them and see them get more popular! Very funny I wasn’t included. Maybe because I’m on the cycling list. Wikio are running some very funky statistics and it does seem like more of “Let’s try and get lots of links to our site by telling people we’ve made a top 50″.
I am ignoring it. *sniff*
Heh. Good idea.
I think they perhaps need a better process to let more people choose their category.
>Unlike the political sphere though, the London bloggers haven’t been at each others throats snarling about who moves up or down.
To be fair, no politicos have really either. I wouldn’t even call it vigorous, just people making a note of shifts when they have been been in their favour and tying in to the context as far as they can. I’ve been a bit proactive in explaining things; I can remember what it was like when people *were* at each others’ throats.
I wouldn’t agree that Dezeen “hardly ever mentions” London — they run at least a few London-based stories in the average week (two so far this week) and are big on events like, say, London Design Week and the Festival of Architecture. But you’re right, they shouldn’t be part of this list at all.
They must be having a quiet month, as I really couldn’t find anything about London over the past few weeks at least.
Agree the rankings are stupid. There is no way my poxy little blog is better than Londonist.
Like all lists of blogs it’s entirely subjective – most of the time when these lists come out you might spot one or two your know and read, you might be aware of another few – but most are lost.
That’s the nature of blogging – if you’ve got an audience and can corral them to vote; you’ll win awards, OR if you’re active in particular sections of the blogging world and you get noticed by a judge or the media you’re likely to find you’ll start to win things… what it doesn’t do (generally speaking) is change your base audience, blogs are organic, people stumble across them and it’s this reason that makes these lists feel so strange.