Todd Andrlik's Power Move

Todd Andrlik, a new PR blogger, is getting lots of link love, and for very good reason. He's compiled what he calls a list of the top marketing blogs, and calls it The Power 150. As a recovering list-maker, but owner of a new blog (four months old; I've retired from my first two), I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing. I wasn't thrilled to find errors in Todd's computations (for example, initially he said I had a Google PageRank of "0" when in fact it is "6"; graciously, he's corrected this error, and many others). Nor was I thrilled to see that his computations, which are based on three objective scores and one subjective, are not averaged, giving his personal opinion of blogs -- including his opinion of his own blog -- a higher value than, er, Google PageRank (talk about a power move).

But I quibble. This list demonstrates a tremendous amount of industry, and, of course, chutzpah. Chutzpah is good. If the marketing world didn't know about Todd in 2006, a bunch of folks in that world now do. Now let's hear what he has to say.

Comments

[Todd Andrlik]

Very fair, G, but I should address some of your points. Both Google Page Rank and Technorati rankings are determined by link analysis, so I didn’t think averaging was necessary. Giving Google Page Rank more value would have created an enormous link weight. Combined, Technorati and Google Page Rank account for more than half the value. The Bloglines score covers about 25 percent of the ranking value with my personal subjective score addressing the remaining 20 percent, which I think is fair considering it is the only metric focusing on post frequency, creativity and use of audio, video and photos.

And I do have a good excuse for initially giving hubub a zero Google Page Rank score. As you wrote in your post, you are the owner of a four-month old blog. Unfortunately, Google Page Rank takes a while to analyze new blogs, so several online calculators still process your URL as zero… and still do today. I double- and sometimes triple-checked all the blogs that came up with a zero Page Rank, including yours. As you said, I made the correction immediately after being notified.

I hope you can understand that I am only one guy, so there will be more mistakes found. But I’ll correct them quickly and keep the ball moving as I think this is a great resource. The most exciting part of my Power 150 experience has been cross-introducing so many blogs. Tons of fellow bloggers have emailed me to say thanks because they have discovered a variety of great new content – including your own.

By the way, when does the “new blogger” title go? One year? Two years?

[Giovanni Rodriguez]

Thanks, Todd. Fair enough. Tough to do these things alone, and I wouldn't even know how to do it myself. Glad you are doing it -- it's a very nice resource.

The ribbing I gave you was meant to point out the obvious -- we all benefit from the logrolling (and blogrolling) that these kinds of lists generate, and that's one reason these lists are so seductive. But there are benefits that go beyond our own personal and professional needs. And that's a good thing. We are all ego *and* group driven.

Re: new blogger -- I think it's already gone.

[Mukund Mohan]

Giovanni
How do you find the google page rank publicly?

[Giovanni Rodriguez]

Hi Mukund -- there are a number of online tools for determining PageRank. Here's one:

http://www.mypagerank.net/

[francois gossieaux]

Building lists is tough and I applaud Todd for trying. Delivering a qualitative list of blogs for a particular topic is an immense benefit to people looking for quality information on a particular topic amongst the 55M+ blogs that are out there.

Unfortunately Technorati and Google are a measure of popularity and not authority as they claim to be. I am not sure what percentage of readers are still using bloglines, but there again, I think there is skew in the number of people who subscribe to a blog. It would be better to be able to use the Feedburner stats (which are reader-independent), but that requires blog owners to enable their awareness API - which not all have done.

As for the Google pagerank...the simplest way is probably to use the Google toolbar.

[francois gossieaux]

i actually just checked my stats and out of the 841 feedburner subscribers I had yesterday, only 23% came from bloglines. The lead is now Google Feedfetcher with 25%...amazing how things change :)