While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security. -- Ann Coulter
The Blogosphere Power Rankings -- The Most Popular Political Blogs On The Net
by John Hawkins
Regular readers of RWN will remember that back in January, I did an article that got a lot of play called, "100 Of The Most Popular Political Websites On The Net". What a lot of you probably don't know is that originally I planned to only rank the blogs in that article and only later did I decide to rank all political websites.
Well, I thought the time was right to go ahead and do what I set out to do -- rank the political blogs. Of course, there are a number of inherent difficulties in doing that sort of thing. You have to decide what counts as a blog -- for example, are websites like Fark & Counterpunch actually blogs (I say "no")? Then there was the issue of sorting "political blogs" out from other types of blogs like Boing Boing & Wil Wheaton's page. Some of them were tough calls, but I made my decisions and decided to let the chips fall where they may. Also, I had to try to make sure I took a look at all the top political blogs on the left and right. I may have missed a few, but I spent almost two hours compiling a list of every popular blog I could think of from links & ranking services across the net. Some of the pages I perused to compile this list included, NZ Bear's Ecosystem, Daypop, Technorati, Blogstreet, & Blogrolling.
So after I compiled a list of blogs, I had to rank them. I decided to use Alexa for that purpose. However, Alexa does have some flaws.
-- Alexa can't properly read all the Blog*spot pages so they all receive the same rank. Because of that, none of them were included.
-- Furthermore, Alexa sometimes cannot distinguish between the main page and secondary page of a website. For example, Alexa gives National Review the same ranking as The Corner which meant I had to leave out a few blogs of worth that were hosted on much larger pages.
I'd estimate that those two factors probably knocked out a good 7 or 8 blogs that would have otherwise been ranked. Furthermore, some of the ranks have changed slightly since I recorded their ranks yesterday. Do keep that in mind as well.
As far as the scoring goes, all 50 websites are listed with their Alexa rank following their link. So for example, a "1" would mean the page was the most popular website on the net. A "100,000" would mean the 100,000th most popular page on the net. With that being said, let's go ahead and take a look at the rankings...
