Thursday, August 06, 2009

The new Wikio rankings for Lib Dem blogs

Charlotte Gore has kindly extracted the list of Lib Dem blogs from Wikio's new top 100 for political blogs.

It begins:

5. Liberal Democrat Voice Up 1 place
17. Mark Reckons Up 10
21. Charlotte Gore Up 2
32. Himmelgarten Cafe Up 4
33. Liberal England Down 2

As I have drifted down from second to fifth place in this list in recent months, it is time to insert a few caveats.

The prominence that the Wikio rankings have recently attained is mainly down to their excellent promotion amongst bloggers - something I have been happy to help with. I generally use Technorati and IceRocket to see who is linking to me, and they usually give very different lists. So I don't know how comprehensive the Wikio list that generates these rankings is.

Still there are some good things over at the Wikio site. The listing for this blog provides a variety of tag cloud:
UK Politics • Parties • Liberal Democrats • Entertainment • The Parliament • Conservative Party • Music • Sport • Liberal Party • Rock and Pop • Liberal Democrats • Nick Clegg • Shropshire • Actors and Actresses • Labour Party • Lifestyle • Leicestershire • Government • England • The House of Commons
That provides a fair picture of this blog and, impressively, is not based on my own tagging.

Wikio also gives what it says are the most linked to postings from this blog in July:
  • Norwich North was a triumph for Rennardism
  • Random thoughts on the Norwich North result
  • The Brampton Valley Way and a sign in Polish
That is more puzzling, because I was not aware that anyone had linked to my Brampton Way post. [Later. This is nonsense: it was in a Britblog Roundup.]

Incidentally, I have fallen rather further in the list for all blogs, but that is because Wikio is not listing more non-political blogs. The preponderance of political blogs puzzled me when I was given the exclusive preview in June.

2 comments:

Blake Rhodes said...

Thanks for using!

Blake Rhodes
IceRocket.com

Dan said...

Jonathan, sorry to have taken so long to comment on this. Thanks for your kind words on the ranking and your previous publishing of a sneak preview.

You had me worried regarding your "Top 3 posts" until I saw the edit...

The preponderance of Political blogs has frankly never puzzled me actually, more intrigued me. But it is simply down to the fact that there is a huge amount of good political blogs that publish regularly - way more than blogs concerning other topics - and also these bloggers are particularly active in terms of referencing other sites.

Politics as a topic is obviously enormously rich, dynamic and important, and often inflammatory, so there is always a lot to be discussed and discussed vigorously. Coupling the fact that the political blogging community is populated by a lot of serious bloggers who produce quality content with the fact that they are discussing and indeed debating a subject that is always likely to necessitate backlinks, it easily explains the dominance in the overall rankings.

Being a Brit working in a European company with 6 international sites (and a ranking for each country), I've always been quite pleased by the strong (if perhaps overwhelming) presence of high-quality political blogs in the .co.uk Top Blogs.

Dan
Wikio UK