I was contacted the other day by Blogged.com, saying that they've been following my blog, and it looks like they like it. So, I've got two pieces of good news to share on that front...

1. Blogs are rated out of 10, and mine rated 8.3. This puts it in the "Great" tier, which is the third highest tier, behind "Excellent" and "Superb".

Only the top, top blogs get the Superb rating, which is a perfect 10.0. How hard is that to get? Well, they've tracked and rated 17,149 blogs under the "Technology" banner, and only 2 rated Superb. One is TechCrunch, which should be pretty familiar to readers of this blog, and the other is WiredScience (from Wired magazine), which is a bit off-center from my day-to-day coverage. Following "Superb", anything between 9.0 and 9.9 is "Excellent", and "Great" covers blogs with a rating between 8.0 and 8.9.

2. My blog is rated #1 among all the Telecom blogs they're tracking. Telecom is a tiny subset of all the Technology blogs, and only includes 84 blogs. While there are roughly 550 "Technology" blogs with ratings higher than my 8.3 rating (hey, I'll take that among 17,000+ total blogs!!!), there aren't any rated higher among Telecom blogs - I'll definitely take that.

There are a few familiar blogs in this category for what it's worth, including VoIP News, Jajah's blog, Brough Turner and IP Business Magazine. These are all pretty good blogs, so I consider myself to be in good company, and it's great to get such a positive rating among this crowd.

So, what does this mean? Lots of ways to look at this. First, it's great to be recognized at all, and second, it's also great to get a solid rating amidst so many good blogs and bloggers. If you're curious, I urge you to scan through the top blogs, whether the Telecom blogs, or the massive list of over 17,000 Technology blogs. The list of Tech blogs is as interesting for who is there and who is not. I had a quick scan of the blogs with ratings of 8.3 or higher, and aside from TechCrunch, I really only found 3 that I follow regularly - Jeff Pulver (9.2), Ken Camp (8.7) and Tom Keating (8.3). Interesting, huh???

How do they rate these blogs? Well, I can only go by what the website says - the ratings are done by sector-specific editors, and they base these on four criteria: "frequency of updates, relevance of content, site design, and writing style". As you can see from the site, all readers are welcome to rate these blogs, but I'm not sure how much impact these ratings have on the editors.

You can also suggest other blogs for evaluation, which is great since I suspect they're missing quite a few very good blogs that we all follow regularly. I haven't explored the Tech blogs rated below mine, so there could well be many familiar blogs there, so I urge you to look for yours if you're wondering. Are there better telecom blogs out there than mine? Absolutely. Blogged.com is a work in progress, so by all means suggest other blogs you'd like to see them rate.

For someone like me, Blogged.com is a good story. As you may know, my blog is 100% content-driven - there are no banners, ads, sponsors or Google links. As such, my traffic is minuscule compared to most - if not all - the bloggers I follow, and I suspect my blog is invisible to a big swath of the market. I'll never generate the kind of traffic that most bloggers have, and I concede that my following will be small, but hopefully loyal.

Furthermore, I'm a writer at heart, and take a lot of care in what I say and how I say it. I'm at ease saying that most bloggers are not great writers, and their notoriety comes from other competencies. So, I like what I see with Blogger.com, as their criteria is based more on what the blogger is creating rather than how many people link to them, or how well their blog is search-optimized.

So, who is Blogged.com? Well, I've been asking the same question myself. Their site launched in February, so it's pretty new, and you can read a brief review about them here from Webware's Rafe Needleman.

For those of you into social media, what makes Blogged.com different from things like Technorati is that it's based on expert evaluation of the content itself as opposed to key words or tags embedded in the content. It's a bit like Digg in that it makes use of crowdsourcing - a big buzzword in social media - which draws on input from readers to gauge the importance and relevance of a blog within its peer group. So, it's very Web 2.0 by nature, building on sharing and mass collaboration, but with a judicious mix of editorial objectivity (or so we'd like to think)and collective input from readers and other bloggers.

I really can't say how much stock you should put in these ratings, but Blogged.com seems like a pretty good barometer to me. Sure, they're new, and their universe of blogs will continue to expand, and whether you agree or disagree, you have plenty of opportunity to speak your mind and recommend other blogs for them to evaluate.

And if nothing else, I love their website because it's a great collection of blogs, and I'll use this as a regular resource now when I need to drill down for granular industry research.

Technorati tags: Blogged.com, Jon Arnold, telecom blogs

Posted by jonarnold at May 6, 2008 08:50 AM

Comments

Congratulations Jon!

What a great news story! (Plus, thanks for all the new telecom content I've got to pour through!)

Posted by: jules at May 7, 2008 07:41 AM

Interesting that blogged.com put me under Gadgets and not Telecom. Gadgets has a heck of a lot more blogs & competition, i.e. Engadget, Gizmodo, etc. So I'll take my 8.3 against that category any day! :)

Posted by: Tom Keating at May 7, 2008 05:25 PM