The most popular Chicago blogs written by one person (according to alexa.com and google)
6. almostgirl.coffeespoons.org
12. toomanychefs.com
13. wiphey.com
14. whateverland.com
15. werty.net
16. johnsadowski.com
17. rachelleb.com
18. absenter.org
19. push.cx
20. zulkey.com
(spudart.org is #30)
Methodology:
1. I took all 2,124 Chicago blogs listed at chicagobloggers.com.
2. All the blogs hosted by blogspot, livejournal, xanga, etc; had to be deleted from the list, because alexa doesn’t give a ranking for each blog, but instead gives the same super high ranking for all blogspot blogs. That left about 1,007 chicago blogs.
3. I recorded the alexa ranking for these 1,007 blogs.
4. Only the blogs with an alexa ranking of 1,000,000 or better was kept on the list. That brought the list down to about 80 blogs.
5. I ordered the 80 blogs according to the best alexa rankings. These rankings can be a bit sketchy, because if the blog’s author has the Alexa toolbar installed, that would greatly increase that blog’s rankings. I needed another stat to balance this discrepancy.
6. So I looked up on Google the number external links point back to each blog. If a lot of other sites link back to the blog, it shows there should be good content on the site.
7. I ordered the 80 blogs according to the best google link ratings.
8. I totalled out these two orders to create one master ranking.
Did your blog make the top 80 chicago blogs? Click on the comments and read below the fold.
You can check your blog’s alexa rating by going to alexa.com. To get your google link quantity, go to google.com and do a search for something for: link:yourdomain.com. Replace the “yourdomain.com” part with your blog URL.
that is a massive chart! very nice. i submitted my blog to chicagobloggers over a week ago. It still hasn’t appeared on their site. I’m very disappointed.
Boy, I wonder if I should try to get the Chicagobloggers thing to take me down, I haven’t lived there in a year! When I submitted back in the day I never even saw it appear on their site. I guess it took them a while
Wow julie. #6 on the list is no longer in Chicago. At least every else gets to move up a notch! 😀
No because I’m a huge loser
Tom, I bet your blog at http://www.xanga.com/tomsaaristo would be high on the list. Just look at all the comments you get every day! Your blog didn’t make the list, cuz it’s on xanga, and alexa isn’t able to track individual xanga blogs. And google doesn’t really track links to individual xanga blogs. According to chicagobloggers.com there are 21 xanga bloggers in chicago. It would be interesting to see a top list of those. I bet you’d be near (or at) the top.
Nice! Thanks for the link.
Woah I am #14… I am e-famous! I guess I better thank all my visitors for checkin in from time to time 🙂
I’m sorry to report that Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance is no longer in the metropolitan area.
Hmmm I went through the Top 20 sites that you listed and the following sites are group blogs (besides perhaps not being in Chicago as well) 2. Cosmic Variance 4. Popculture Junkies 9. Livemusic Blog 11. House In Progress (written by 2 people) 12. Too Many Chefs So while I think the idea of this post was a good one, and it’s pleasant to see my site listed (#76 – but obviously higher now), it’s hard to look at this list as anything other than a bunch of outgoing links.
Wow, ed thanks for giving more detail on some of these sites. I plan on doing this list every year, I’ll have to remember that these sites are group ones, not individual ones. And your note about SEO outgoing links is interesting. Honestly, it never crossed my mind. I try to do some decent Search Engine Optimization, but I would never just list a crapload of links for SEO. That’s just rude. Besides, I would think that having this long list of links would rather hurt my SEO rankings a little, just because of the sheer volume of them. It’s just that when I did this research, I was going to just do a top 20 (Anything more than that and people’s eyes start to glaze over). But seeing that I have all this data, I wanted to make it public, so people could find out where they rank on the list. And I could have just listed the URLs as blank non-hotlinked text, but that kinda defeats the handiness of the internet. So you can see this list however you like, but I never intended it to be just “a bunch of outgoing links.”