(interested in this kind of thing? Also check out Christina’s forthcoming talk, via Bora)
If we assume that people blogroll sites that they think (a) are good and (b) are relevant to their audience then it seems fair to also assume that by aggregating and analyzing blogrolls from blogs tagged in Nature.com Blogs (did I mention Nature.com Blogs already? Did you sign up?) we can come up with some sort of ‘top ten blogs’ in each area.
I wrote some scripts to do the relevant scraping. Here are the results. Note that ranks can be tied – The Loom and Aetiology share fourth place, for example:
Across all subject areas
I left out the raw numbers for now (at this stage it’s just an experiment) but can tell you that Pharyngula and The Panda’s Thumb are way ahead of the competition… they’re on twice as many blogrolls as Real Climate (also a very popular choice).
It all looks very Long Tail’ish…
… that is to say that there are a very small number of blogs on lots of blogrolls and a very large number of blogs on few blogrolls.
We’re been tracking links between science blogs since Nature.com Blogs launched but there isn’t enough data to do a proper comparison between blogroll popularity and incoming link popularity yet. I’d be interested to see what kind of correlation there is: do you link more often to the blogs on your blogroll? Are there some blogs that you add because you feel you should? Does much reciprocal blogrolling go on (almost certainly, I’d guess)? Is there a blogrolling equivalent to prominently displaying an unread copy of Ulysses on your bookshelf even though all you read is Stephen King?
(tables for individual subject areas are below the fold)
Chemistry
| Blog | Rank |
| Molecule of the Day | 1 |
| Useful Chemistry | 1 |
| Developing Intelligence | 2 |
| The Sceptical Chymist | 2 |
| Genomicron | 2 |
| easternblot.net | 2 |
| Stoat | 3 |
| petermr’s blog | 4 |
| The Culture of Chemistry | 4 |
| chem-bla-ics | 4 |
Life Sciences
Physics
Bioinformatics
