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.
Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!
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 out Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for everyday use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable anymore.
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 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 a huge amount of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There are 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 heartbroken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.
StumbleUpon
Pros:
StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, and an 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 only 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 blog search 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 sometimes and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't rely 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.
Comments
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Congrats on making it up the list. Good articles on here.
Posted by: free xbox 360 | January 1, 2009 9:06 AM
Blogrolls are another great way in identifying blogs within a niche. Most blogs will keep a blogroll, so as soon as you've identified a blog within a niche just look at who they've linked to. And then look at those blogs' blogrolls. And so forth.
Posted by: Daan Jansonius | January 1, 2009 9:24 AM
Marshall, it's no longer called AideRSS :) It's now PostRank. Another limitation of thier service that has forced me to uninstall is that when using Google Reader offline, the little constantly swirling 'refreshing' icon is like a red rag to a bull. I wish they would make a few changes so it didn't irritate the hell out of offline users. That and custom colour for the rank icon. Minor detail, but I can't stand how it suddenly makes my Reader all orange. Yuck. And thus endith my new years day rant.
Moving on, thanks for the tip on Ask.com's blog search. Although finding F1 blogs seems quite difficult. The way I went about ranking them, and I know Alexa aren't the best, but I use their Firefox plugin and it gives me a semi-accurate idea in my status bar as to whether a blog is getting tons of traffic or nothing at all.
Posted by: Ray Scott | January 1, 2009 9:25 AM
It´s not just about discovering niche blogs but niche news feeds. I wrote an article about that some weeks ago (http://blog.kassenzone.de/2008/11/14/lastfm-fur-news-google-20/) where we worked on a startup that works like last.fm, google reader and technorati together.
Actually the services from your list do their job worse every day, due to a lack of database technology. They state of the art databases can not handle exponential growing information and information sources.
Posted by: Alex | January 1, 2009 9:43 AM
Thanks for the redux'd comparisons and critiques. There have been some improvements since the original post last February and more are coming. Technorati's blog directory is one of the areas, along with the "channels" in general, slated for an overhaul that will focus on accuracy and coverage. An interesting item to note is that the tag clouds on the blog info pages are much better indicators of topical focus than a blog claim's declared tags. For example, http://technorati.com/blogs/www.readwriteweb.com says that "New Zealand" is among the topics RRW. Looking at the tag cloud though, "facebook" or "podcasts" are more prevalent topics. These are the kinds of things we're considering for future revisions of the blog directory.
By the way, the advantage of linking to Technorati's tag space is that it provides your readers with a pivot to other blogs using the same tags you are in your post. When folks only link to their private tag space, they're essentially creating a topical walled garden.
regards,
-Ian
Tec
Posted by: Ian Kallen
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January 1, 2009 9:51 AM
I don't think the problem is so much identifying the top blogs, since the best conversations take place further down the long tail.
The question should rather be "how to find a niche or a network" in my perspective.
Posted by: Bruno Amaral
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January 1, 2009 10:42 AM
I just found your blog and this post in particular from a Google Alert I have set up for real estate. Thanks for the much needed lesson on the pros and cons of each service.
Posted by: Kathy Goughenour | January 1, 2009 11:52 AM
alltop is a great help for finding great blogs on certain topics
Posted by: chris brinkman | January 1, 2009 2:04 PM
One problem with the Technorati list is that the tags are meaningless. Look at the top 10 list for travel:
http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/lifestyle/travel
None of the blogs have anything to do with travel. There are no checks on tags, so you can tag anything and Technorati will blindly list it as such.
Posted by: Gary Arndt | January 1, 2009 6:29 PM
What about pingback from blogs to technorati ,I included my blog to their listings I added their ping info on my ping servers still technorati says no ping from lat 10 days what about this does it have any solution.
Posted by: venkat | January 1, 2009 7:44 PM
Why not submit via OnlyWire then where you submit to multiple sites at once?Is that frowned upon.?Also Technorati still the best as far as I am concerned.Have had a lot of traffic via them and after two days with Technorati even made a few hits from Google searches.There must be a connection because I have never had that before.
Posted by: Yvette Kelly | January 1, 2009 10:50 PM
Great resource. I have included it in a product promotion method I am creating where I want to describe step by step how to launch a product:
http://open.metocube.com/mc/element/view-web/Product+promotion
Posted by: Lucas Rodriguez Cervera | January 2, 2009 1:40 AM
Feeding a RSS feed from a Google news and/or blog query into your feed reader puts new stuff right where you need it.
Posted by: Dave | January 2, 2009 2:46 AM
I guess it is a combination of technorati,page rank, alexa, the amount of feed subscribers you have and so on.There is a good ranking list available with the best internet marketing blogs.It can be found here: http://www.winningtheweb.com/im-top-blogs/
Posted by: Tom Lindstrom | January 2, 2009 3:12 AM
I agree with what you pointed out here but for me I don't really think there's a way to identify top blogs. I mean before I like how technorati used to do it as you've said they have become ugly now. Maybe the no.of comments? or maybe not!
Posted by: Melvin | January 2, 2009 3:19 AM
Excellent suggestions as always, MK. I did see someone mention Alltop. I've actually started going there first because I've found Guy's crew to be exceptional at at least getting a list of what could be the top blogs in a specific niche. I double-checked my self-built list of alcohol, wine and spirits blogs against theirs and it was almost dead on, even picked up a couple from them I hadn't found yet.
I'm also compelled for some reason to echo your sentiments on Technorati and express a fair amount of disappointment in a tool once so useful that has become so not. It's like they're begging to be the next big thing to blow it ... like the social media version of Netscape or something. Not that whining about them seems to do any good, but surely someone there is paying attention. Right?
Thank you for continuing the thinking on blog identification, RSS and more. Always reliable, you are sir.
Posted by: Jason Falls | January 2, 2009 3:51 AM
Hand picked niche content like that at alltop proves to be a worthy way to filter. I also like blogged and newsflashr for their unique views of alternative & mainstream news.
Posted by: Yvonne | January 2, 2009 4:28 AM
I am already using most of these. Of those listed here StumbleUpon is my favorite for sure. I'm never tried RSSAide or Ask.com really so I'm going to take a look at those two. Thanks. ;-)
Posted by: Gerald Weber | January 2, 2009 7:57 AM
Feeding a RSS feed from a Google news and/or blog query into your feed reader puts new stuff right where you need it.
Posted by: söve
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January 2, 2009 9:32 AM
Good list! Why did you not include some tools such as popurl?
Posted by: Guillaume | January 2, 2009 1:07 PM
Someone mentioned Alltop, and I agree that these types of aggregators are good. In addition to alltop, I'd recommend the LOUD3R network of sites, where you can see nice listings of the blogs they crawl for each topic area. Polymeme is another good site.
Posted by: Shawn Smith | January 2, 2009 10:12 PM
What about http://alltop.com ? I found it pretty accurate and easy to use
Posted by: Sanket | January 3, 2009 10:10 AM
I was doing some consulting and was looking for industry specific blogs to connect with. I naturally went to Technorati but it turned out to be completely useless in identifying the top blogs covering the industry.
The best way I found was to just do some good old fashion searching along with Compete.com numbers.
Posted by: Jmartens | January 4, 2009 12:15 PM
very helpful article, thanks for the list.
Posted by: Raphael@Top Web Templates | January 4, 2009 6:30 PM
Good info! Been working a lot lately on linkbacks, searching blogs, and keeping my subscriptions in order. Thanks!
Posted by: Marla Bosworth | January 13, 2009 12:15 PM
Your post has on internet marketing is definitely true. Internet marketing has opened new ways of attracting visitors to the website giving the webmasters a way of earning cash as well as web status. Let's see what the future holds for internet marketing.
Posted by: jeff paul internet business | January 14, 2009 7:31 PM
I think Viralogy.com is looking to create a better way to rank and discover new personal blogs in specific niches. They haven't launched yet but they do let people peep in to see how it works....
Posted by: Sufan Wang | January 15, 2009 6:13 PM