Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.
Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.
Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look our Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for every day use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable any more.
How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.
Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.
Technorati
Pros:
The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.
Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.
Cons:
After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers every to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.
The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.
The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.
Del.icio.us
Pros:
We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.
There's huge amounts of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There's also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.
Cons:
Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.
Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URl much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heart broken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.
StumbleUpon
Pros:
StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.
Cons:
It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category, the search results page is really random looking. Good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.
Google Reader Recommendations
Pros:
Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled just with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.
Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.
AideRSS
Pros:
I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.
Cons:
The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.
Ask.com Blogsearch
Pros:
Ask has the best blogsearch on the web, it uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.
Cons:
Ask does get overloaded some times and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't reley on it alone. Ask blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.
Conclusion
See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.
What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.
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Damn, Marshall. This is a super helpful post. Thank you for sharing cards that less secure people would hold close to their vests.
Posted by: Justin Kistner | February 15, 2008 10:39 AM
Yes I agree. I'm always trying to help our bloggers find blogs in their niche. You're right about aideRSS, sometimes it trickles, sometimes a flood and sharing those links has been problematic for me.
The one thing I don't like about the new GR shared items is that I'd like one feed from all my friends. I don't want to have to keep going there and checking and adding them to FeedDemon.
How have you found FeedHub Marshall?
Posted by: Tris Hussey | February 15, 2008 10:45 AM
Great post. Thanks for sharing alternatives. I usually use Technorati, but I will start trying out the others.
Posted by: Charles | February 15, 2008 10:50 AM
Really helpful post. I've tried so many things -- MyBlogLog was too random, Technorati was too lemming-like; GR is awkward; but have liked both Google and Ask.com's blogsearch. Really looking forward to trying AideRSS. Thanks for this. I'm going to share it with my Agency.
Posted by: Merredith | February 15, 2008 11:25 AM
Google Blog Search is another alternative, and unlike Google Reader you don't need to be signed in to anything. On the flip side, the recommendations aren't as great.
Posted by: Peter Cooper | February 15, 2008 11:31 AM
You will find this comment to be a little out of place, but it is very much in snyc with your article.
Many a time on any given day, a feeling comes to me that only we geeky(or techie, whatever you prefer) people are using/reading blogs heavily. We look,find and celebrate new ways to find things on web.
But, rest of world still uses google search for all practical purposes.(Digg membership So, for a business to make money on any tool which enables a common man to find top blogs/news sites/wikis is still a daunting task. Ask digg or del.icio.us.
In fact, it is a business idea to provide a dynamic list of top 10/100 blogs/wikis/news/(wikipedia or Knol or answers.com) for any given topic in an intutive and reliable way.
Or I appeal to google, start something called 'Google Blog Trends'
Posted by: Varun | February 15, 2008 12:17 PM
This is a great opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose. We can create accounts in social bookmarkings, for example.
Posted by: CanCar | February 15, 2008 1:10 PM
Don't forget Top Ten Sources manual approach:
http://www.toptensources.com
Also, I'll push back a bit on your rel="tag" criticism; From the start, Technorati always indexed other sources of tags as well as those pointing to itself, but by providing an index we helped drive the open standard's adoption.
Posted by: Kevin Marks | February 15, 2008 4:09 PM
Great post.. this is super-helpful information. There is a lot of demand for finding the leader and movers in any given field, and this is a throughly modern way to do it.
@Peter Cooper,
You're right, Google Blog Search has lame results.
Posted by: Brett Andrew Borders | February 15, 2008 5:24 PM
Shame on you, Marshall.
How could you leave out "navigating blogrolls". It's still the best way to find blogs in any given topic.
Find one, navigate to the rest.
Posted by: peter caputa | February 15, 2008 7:08 PM
Nothing quite does what we need because the ones who do it charge for the service. Buzzlogic is my top-of-mind.
The Buzz Hunt - Todd Parsons, Co-Founder of Buzzlogic
Posted by: xavierv | February 15, 2008 8:47 PM
I wrote a little piece on relevance in social networks and local density when this discussion just came up recently.
If you treat the blogs as a network, then you are trying to do cluster analysis, and find the key nodes within that cluster. Deciding how to define what that "niche" is is the harder part.
It may be easiest as a practical matter to invent a new niche, declare a set of your cronies to be part of that niche, interconnect with each other, and start quoting each other regularly. Presto! Top billing.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | February 15, 2008 10:44 PM
I'm still rather shocked how little effort has been put into this lately. Do you remember blog index? Or was it called blogarati? Then there was Feedster of course. Technorati bit off way too much and now is desperately trying to make something shiny to appease investors that isn't appeasing anyone. Finally, it seems like Google is purposely trying to obfuscate results.
Thanks for the list I'll go through ask and aiderss. Perhaps Gabe or Kevin should add ranking to their indexing work with Techmeme and Spinner. The funded companies and big boys both seemed to have failed. The former by having to become 100+ million business (or die trying) and the latter because they consider blogs just another website they already index in their main searched.
It's great opportunity for any individual that wants to start a highly desired service. Feedster, for example, had it's biggest usage ever when they posted their top 100 blogs. Imagine a service that allowed you to slice and dice 20 different way through the worlds blogs. It would be used everyday
Posted by: Ted Rheingold | February 16, 2008 12:28 AM
I spent some time at Google and Ask. They're both really frustrating, though Ask's subscribe and post features at least show some original thinking. But both still use simple keyword matching.
A search for 'health' returns a lot of blog entries that had the word health in them, very few of which are health blogs. They just aren't helpful. The feeds tab in Ask.com does do a good job of pulling out blogs that are dedicated to health, and Google's brief list of 'Related Blogs' are usually on-topic, but these features would hardly wow anyone in 2008.
Posted by: Ted Rheingold | February 16, 2008 12:38 AM
One meta-level tool is using the pattern matching abilities in our brain based on the six tools mentioned plus those in the comments. In short, over time a person will learn about which blogs are most influential/etc.
But Marshall is really talking about niches. Finding the most relevant blogs takes time. For example, most folks probably start out with feeds that have 10,000's of subscribers. Obviously, the more niche, the fewer subscribers.
I find the most relevant blogs for me have perhaps 50-200 subscribers. Takes a lot of time to find these.
One additional way is getting to know people who have similar interests. Check out their blogs. In the end, this might be the best way.
Posted by: Mike Reynolds | February 16, 2008 6:42 AM
This is a pretty good round-up, and with respect to Technorati, there are some very constructive remarks. We've been doing some similar self-evaluation that will address some of this -- in the near future in fact -- and we're always looking for ways to improve what we do. One thing to put in perspective: nine million people came to Technorati.com last month, both bloggers and people who read blogs. We've set a pretty high bar for ourselves, and the real-time nature and sheer scale of our index adds several layers of complexity not shared by others. While we don't always meet everyone's expectations (including our own), be assured that we are listening and trying very hard.
Posted by: Richard Jalichandra (CEO - Technorati) | February 16, 2008 10:26 AM
Our clients want us to answer this question with precision, but unfortunately - as you have pointed out - there is no one tool that provides a totally precise answer. We have a well defined process and use free tools like Google and Technorati and paid tools like Visible Technologies' TruCast and LexisNexis (we like to know which blogs have been mentioned in the mainstream media). Unfortunately, none of the free tools are useful in identifying forums which are important to us. Lastly, only Google provides real value with non-English languages today making identifying blogs and forums in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Italian, Chinese, etc., much more difficult but doable with a good process and discipline.
Posted by: Paul Walker | February 16, 2008 1:40 PM
Pretty interesting feedback all around.
I actually have been playing around with a personal project I'm calling storyrank ( http://www.storyrank.com ) that would sort of address this problem (if enough people started using it). I really started it with the idea of helping people to find the 'best' posts about a given topic...but I think that extends beyond posts to overall blogs as well...
The basic idea was to give people a simple rating widget that they put on each story/blog post. The first time the post is ranked, it's marked on storyrank for indexing (indexing is done a few times a day)...
In the end, the idea is that on the post you'll see what people rate your posts; on story rank you'll be able to search the full-text of any rated post and the list of results you get back is sorted based on the 'readers' rankings as well as most current.
I've also started to work on some additional widgets for the system so that you can see what your top rated posts are (and show them to your users); as well as get a list of the top rated posts for a given 'keyword' or 'topic'...other related widgets are also on my to-do list.
Anyway, it's all still very early stages and I've only been testing it out on my own blog; but it seems to be working well and ready to start scaling out to others.
I would love to hear feedback, additional ideas, and opinions on ways to attack this problem though.
Posted by: Kevin Marshall | February 16, 2008 5:43 PM
About 6 months ago, I held a virtual book tour (VBT). To find potential hosts, I tried Technorati but found it to be a jumbled mess to navigate. So I went back to my old standby--Google Search. But I used it in conjunction with Google Page Rank (GPR).
The goal was to search for my major keywords, check out the GPR and contact blog owners with a rank of 3 at the very least. 4+ was even better. It was a lot of work, but definitely easier than Technorati.
In the end, I had a mix of sites and blogs. Since it was my first virtual book tour, I decided not to be overly picky. A high GPR is better, but there are some advantages to a lower p/r if there is traffic that likes to comment.
The result of my VBT? Very successful. My novel Whale Song made Amazon's bestseller's list in Canada and the US, and I was very satisfied and happy.
Sometimes the simplest solution is the easiest. I always ask myself, 'How does the average person search for something?'
~Cheryl Kaye Tardif,
author of Whale Song
Posted by: Cheryl Kaye Tardif | February 16, 2008 10:23 PM
I heavily rely on linking and recommendations from known blog and that way extremely happy and comfortable. I think using any blog search is passe and really disappointing.
Posted by: kuldeep | February 17, 2008 1:13 AM
Technorati has banned several Wordpress-ran and related blogs. I don't use Technorati anymore. It seems they went from a service to an attempt to control the top spread.
Good read.
Posted by: Ali A. Akbar | February 17, 2008 5:06 AM
This was a great article - the title hooked me :) I use many of these but found some resources that I need to check out. I agree I find technorati results when I search not very successful. Glad to hear they're listening.
Posted by: Cyndee Haydon | February 17, 2008 8:30 AM
Thanks for a very helpful post. I can also attest to Cheryl's method for finding blogs for her VBT. I will be doing one this summer-- and any info I can gather is great!
Beth Fehlbaum, author of Courage in Patience, a story of hope for those who have endured abuse
Posted by: Beth Fehlbaum, author of Courage in Patience, a story of hope for those who have endured abuse | February 17, 2008 9:53 AM
Once I find a blog, I check out the blogroll, and then more blogrolls, all of a sudden I have some core blogs to subscribe to.
Also checking out the blog posts, and seeing who these blogs link to is good for discovery
Posted by: John Tropea | February 17, 2008 1:59 PM
I am always looking for new ways to find good blogs, so this is a great list. Thank you, I am bookmarking it ASAP!
I tend to use Technorati and a basic Google Blog search to get me "in" to a niche, but as it has been said..after that, I love a good Blogroll.
What I love about blogs is that we are self determining. So a knowledgeable Blogger in any given niche will be the best "gatekeeper" into their own community. SOmetimes the hard part is just finding that first doorknob.
Posted by: Claudia D'Arcy | February 18, 2008 8:55 AM
Good post. I hadn't used AdieRSS before but it seems pretty slick. I can't help but feel though, that there's an aspect that's been left out.
Namely, I wouldn't want to confuse "top" with "best". This is really something that will depend on what exactly you're planning on doing once you've found the blog (and subsequent blogger). For example, if you're planning on pitching the blogger, in most cases the "top" blog isn't the best blog. Not to mention that top blogs can often be difficult to penetrate (some being rather pompous), while the better blogs are tend to be more willing to talk, try, and share.
Then you have to ask yourself if you're going for eyeballs or relationship. I personally prefer relationships- eg: a solid community. This can be done pretty simply by looking at the interaction that is occurring on a given blog (interaction being comments and other social media actions taken). An interaction ratio will be really tailored per person or project (eg: interaction/posts). But this often gives a clear idea as to just how much faith and time a bloggers community puts into what's been said.
Not exactly related to this article, but I'd love to have a list of sites that did a bit of filtering when it comes to spam blogs.
All that said, a great post. Played with AdieRSS since I read the post and will try using Delicious a bit more :)
Posted by: Nathan Snell | February 18, 2008 9:06 AM
Technorati is a joke.
The Rat thinks that my real blogs are spam and it thinks my spam blogs are real. Screw 'em!
Posted by: CureDream | February 18, 2008 11:19 AM
Hi
Really a helpful post!
Talks about very basic things, yet things what one misses out on!
Thanks :)
Posted by: Yesha | February 19, 2008 9:19 AM
Thanks for this list that introduced me to new ways of searching for blogs. I tried your list for finding Top Blogs on "Enterprise 2.0". Posted the results and what I think about the various search strategies here: http://www.business20.ch/2008/02/26/suchrezept-fur-enterprise-20-top-blogs-beim-wort-genommen/
Technorati Blog search categories were not helpful, but the Advanced Search retrieved relevant results.
Overall, checking the blogrolls of the sites you find with technorati seems to be the most effective and least time consuming way.
Posted by: Andrea Back | February 25, 2008 10:56 PM
Take a look at www.blogged.com, top blogs by topic. Think this recently launched.
Posted by: Brian Mackie | February 29, 2008 1:53 AM
This post is excellent! Today. The problem is that it will probably need to be updated every 3 to 6 months. Since All the social networking sites evolve super fast, and a new ones gain importance Users) super quickly – lessening the importance of he existing ones.
Ivan | www.JobsBlog.ie
Posted by: Ivan | JobsBlog.ie | March 4, 2008 2:57 AM
Why just Thursday, I wowed a HR officer because I knew how to ID "e-fluentials." I started going on and on about how Technorati or any blog search engine can give their top 100 in a particular category.
It's great Marshall that you share this with us. It indicates that you really want a conversation and you can't have a conversation without divulging something. You're understanding of indexing is noted.
Is there any reason you didn't include Ice Rocket? They're great about breaking down the parts of blogging so newbies--like myself--can wrap our heads around things. I joined Technorati last spring and couldn't get help with many key actions. I didn't understanding pinging, tag clouds, why I should write about things outside my area and most importantly, I forgot that blogs had to submit periodically to many directories.
I think Digg is cool, too because it's people who rate you and make you improve your style and content.
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I use popurls to save time as it's an aggregator of popular blogs. The search feature on del.icio.us is not intuitive, thanks for providing information about it. I had never heard of AideRSS, am going to take a look now. Thanks again.
Peter T - webshop
Posted by: Peter T - Webshop | March 15, 2008 11:08 PM
I have been thinking about this lately too. I am not entirely sure what a good solution might be, but I have some ideas. I just need time to execute on the ideas.
Posted by: Rob Diana
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September 25, 2008 2:43 PM