The British Blogosphere

I’ve spent a lot more time than usual reading other blogs over the last couple of days - partly to see what people are saying and partly to find new people to read. Also partly because of the ‘Joost Invites’ and seeing, out of curtousy what the people visiting my blog have to say on their own.

You may have noticed my blogroll has increased in size a bit.

Anyway, on my travels I came across Modern Life Is Rubbish, a blog I haven’t come across before but apparently one of the bigger of the British weblogs. It’s a good read.

The reason for bringing it up isn’t so I can specifically plug the site, although I wouldn’t mind - no it was because there is a great post on the site about the most influential British bloggers of the moment.

His inspiration came from the Technorati Top 10 most influential UK blogs list and decided that, basing a most influential listing on Technorati ranking alone wasn’t really good enough.

According to Technorati the most influential UK blogs include: Gapingvoid, EU Referendum, Tech Digest, plasticbag.org,
Samizdata.net, c h r o m a s i a, Londonist, Iain Dale’s Diary, Mind Hacks and Loic Le Meur Blog.

Of the above list I’ve heard of Ian Dale, Mind Hacks and plasticbag.org - the rest I’ve never read, but then I don’t really read that many blogs so I wouldn’t use me as a blogometer.

Anyway, Stuart Brown, in the Modern Life article decided this wasn’t a good list. So, with a bit of painstaking research took a look at the list, threw it away and decided to take a completely different approach to the more traditional research.

He “decided to determine the relative merits of the UK blogosphere by the size of the RSS readership - much in the same way circulation is measured for magazines.”

Before I go any further I’m going to admit that I’d only heard of one of the blogs on the following list as well - and I don’t really use RSS feeds - I’ve tried but I prefer a well structured bookmarking system and going round the various blogs every day.

So the list.

The first list, the Technorati one was fairly politics heavy - so taking Technorati link ratings as a sole source of research it would seem that political blogs are at the top of the British blogosphere.

However, Stuarts RSS list has blogs about blogging, new media, the internet and technology at the top.

If we take a look one at a time we see Mashable at the top with an RSS readership (bloglines) of 2,666 - Mashable is a web2.0 new media centric blog.

In second we have Andy Budd with a readership of 1,809, third is And All That Malarkey which is also very webby - in fact all of the top five are blogs that write about the web.

So among people that use RSS blogs that talk about blogs and blogging, web2.0 and new media are the most popular - not much of a suprise really.

For the rest of the top ten visit Modern Life.

I have just three subscribers through Bloglines so would come in right at the bottom - interestingly there are seven subscribers to a feed that has long since died due to me killing the database.

My Technorati ranking is currently 204,560 with 26 links from 22 blogs and my Alexa ranking is in the millions (1,328,190).

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