PDF Top 25 Blogs Just Updated
By Micah L. Sifry, 01/11/2005 - 3:35pm

I’ve just updated our “Top 25 Blogs” list and some explanations are in order. First, these are the 25 political blogs with the most incoming links from other bloggers of any among the more than 5.5 million blogs tracked by Technorati. If you want the exact numbers, go here and look at the second number, of sources, not links. (Full disclosure: My brother Dave is the founder of Technorati.)

Most of these sites are primarily about politics, but several are infused with a strong tech perspective (like Doc Searls, Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Joi Ito’s Web) and thus often come at politics from fresh angles.

Newcomers to the list: Media Matters for America, Baghdad Burning, Joi Ito, Michelle Malkin, Crooked Timber and Scrappleface. Out: Dan Gillmor’s E-Journal (since he bravely left the Mercury News he’s got a new blog but he’s got to re-earn the links), GeorgeWBush.com and Calpundit.

I’ve also left out a couple of highly-linked political sites—Common Dreams, The Smoking Gun, Truthout and Counterpunch—that would otherwise make it into this Top 25 because they aren’t blogs and/or they don’t give readers a way to post comments or join in a conversation.

Obviously the notion of a “Top 25” of anything is deeply problematic, and I’m sure readers may object—probably with good cause—to my inclusion of some of these sites, and/or the exclusion of others. (Fire away—we’ll keep refining this in response.)

The purpose of listing a Top 25 is to give newcomers to the poli-tech blogosphere an easy way to orient themselves. I think it’s fair to say that if you read through posts on these 25 blogs on any given day or week you’ll get a broadly representative dose of what the main conversations of the moment are about. Since there’s really no one definitive way to rank sites, the use of incoming links seems the most small-d democratic. But because that has the effect of leaving out many valuable and influential blogs, I’ve included a number of additional sites worth noting, and will add to those periodically.


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Why in the name of sanity have you included Michelle Malkin?

Have you read what that woman has to say about the Japanese internment camps? Why Micah, WHY?!?!?!?!

By Liza Sabater at Wed, 01/12/2005 - 13:28 | email this page

Why only blogs?

This might interest your readers.
A couplf of weeks back, I assembled a Scorecard of Online Political Writers. I didn't see the need to try and limit to blogs. I wanted to research how various online writers, whether they identify as bloggers or not, exhibit aspects which are associated with blogs, as well as the civ structure. Included are Timothy Noah, Joe Conason, The Note.

My main aim was for diversity of structure; I couldn't hope to rank by a quality metric. I also included Malkin. I did so because of her high ranking in the TLB ecosystem. Also she added some diversity to the mostly all-male review (the group near-blog The Gadflyer has a principal columnist in Laura Rozen.) Savor the irony-- Malkin the beneficiary of affirmative action.

Ultimately, I would like to see a "Top 25" (here, there or anywhere) based on standard journalistic metrics-- e.g., whether, the stories are original research, whether the production as a whole is cohesive, and thus, whether it is valuable to read.

My comments on the PDF list: Winer's angle is not fresh but quite stale. And MyDD is vastly underrated. Not only are Armstrong & Bowers Kos's "blogfather", but in areas like the DNC Chair race, they've provide much of the primary sources which Kos references. And Marshall's abscence from Technorati's top 100 is striking. He is regularly in the top 10 of TLB ecosystem.

Jon

By Jon Garfunkel at Thu, 01/13/2005 - 01:21 | email this page

No local stuff?

I personally like www.blogfordemocracy.org myself :) but then I'm biased.

By timcairl at Fri, 01/14/2005 - 12:10 | email this page

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