Facibus On Blogging

Every now and then it is necessary (or just fun!) to compare relative information on different blogs:

• who makes the most money?
• who has the highest technorati rank (overall and in toto)?
• Where does my blog rank in its niche?

I discussed the possibility of a mashup in Information Architecture Blogosphere:

 This led me to thinking about the IA blogosphere and the technorati-style ranking that I might give for popularity of a set of different IA and IA related blogs. Rather than technorati-style I looked up the Technorati API on ProgrammableWeb. Sure enough, everything there that is needed was there. Being a lazy soul, I looked around for a ready-rolled plugin and came across Douglas Karr’s Technorati Ranking Plugin for WordPress. This plugin displays the ranking for one nominated blog - not quite what I was after, but a useful start. Sadly, owing to an incompatible curl library here, it didn’t work. (And Doug, if you read this - sorry I still can’t get the plugin to work on this new server). The automagical solution is still to come (and if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment - I’ll put it on my project list - a thought that occurs to me is that a “display the rankings of all blogs listed with Technorati by this tag” plugin might be handy).

As an aside: Doug, if you read this post, my apologies, I’ve only just emailed you that error message as promised.

So what would the ultimate relative ranking mashup look like? I’m thinking about a topic map that allowed us all to find blogs on one or more of the following facets:

• estimated income
• relative ranking based on tag/keyword (and some way of grouping these in ways that we think of as topics)
• relative ranking based on physical location (either country-specific or “within n kilometers”)

There are probably a thousand other things that could be added - if you can think of some, please leave a comment.