What, More Rankings?

Arrington and Scoble are amassing lists (manually, of all things) of various blogs subscribers at Google Reader.

I am (momentarily) at 43.

Rubel points out (via Twitter) that as more stats of the old media crowd pour in, the 'pee wee league' bloggers will be pushed out. Steve also makes the sensible observation that the long tail will rapidly be discerned (surprise), and that it might be more interesting to verticalize blogs, instead of lumping them all together.

My take: it's just another go at the same thing. Yesterday we were talking about the meaningfulness of the the Techmeme Leaderboard, and Gabe scrambled to establish that that Top 100 List was legitimate, and the source of legitimacy is Google, leading to... another Top 100 List. Which will have more or less the same 100 sources on it.

Yawn.

Comments

[MikeD]

Although it may be human nature to want a single list of the "top 100" - whether it's bloggers, blogs or sites - this does tend to ignore the value of the 'mid tier' bloggers (the "pee wee league" comment seems patronizing).
When we've looked at this problem, our approach has been to break a single 'long tail' into many 'long tails' based on subject matter, keywords, etc.
Each mid-tier blogger deserves their own audience of relevant readers and those that bang the drum around a single "top 100" really do a dis-service to the whole reason blogs exist - to let people find each other, communicate and share their lives.

[bg]

Among all the many problems I have with social media sites, rank, and the internet in general, is the lack of one clear standard by which to judge how many subscribers a site has.

Doing that trick above throgh Goggle reader shows I have 64. But, my Feedburner is at or near 600 on any given day. Furthermore, when I check the specific breakdown at Feedburner, it shows Google feed alone has 231.

Hard to know what to trust. I wish that a site/blog's total number of of subscribers would be counted regardless if it's via email or a reader, through Google or Bloglines, etc.

Can't we all just get along?

One world. One total.

My work here is done.

;-p