You may remember the Guide to Political Blogging (local copy, copyright acknowledged) put out by Iain Dale in autumn 2006. As someone relatively new to the political blogosphere in the UK, I have been analysing some of the blogs recommended by Iain.

Analysis of Iain’s List

Looking around articles put out in response to the publication of the Guide, only one - as far as I can see - did any detailed analysis, and that was an item published by the Spy Blog. Spy commented on Iain’s “personal” criteria:

“Since Iain’s personal criteria for scoring blogs included “humour” and “writing ability”, we are astonished that we rated a mention at all !

However Iain’s listings do not give a complete picture, as there are some notable omissions from his lists.”

Spy analysed Iain’s Top 100 blogs, using Bloglines News Feed subscription data:

“We tend to look at the number of Bloglines syndication feed aggregator website subscriptions to our RSS / XML syndication feeds, to get an idea of how we compare with some of the other UK blogs.”

Unfortunately, the Spy data (local copy) provided inevitably small samples. The largest number of subscribers was Guido Fawkes with 398 subscribers, while more than 80% of the blogs compared had less than 100 subscribers.

Analysis using Google / Technorati Data

I’ve been doing a more rigorous - but still far from perfect - analysis, using data from Technorati and Google.

My analysis uses a different approach, of taking the top 25 of each set of blogs (Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, and non-aligned), to make sure I get sufficient political diversity.

Before I start, I should recapitulate that these are based on Iain’s personal - and therefore idiosyncratic - selection. I have preserved Iain’s mistakes: such as missing out Recess Monkey and making Pickled Politics LibDem.

I will be writing about my findings later this week, but I already have come up with several questions based on my initial look at 40 blogs.

I wonder why do so many top bloggers use hosted blogging platforms, such as Blogger? There are pros and cons with these services. As Darren Rowse, of problogger.net writes:

If you just want a blog and don’t care much about having your own unique domain, are not too interested in tweaking your blog or getting all the latest and greatest features then hosted options are a completely valid choice.

If you’re wanting to develop serious blog and have aspirations for it to be used on a professional sort of level (whether as a business or corporate blog, as a blog to build your own profile or a blog to earn income from advertising) I’d recommend you go in the direction of a stand alone blog.

I think that most serious political bloggers - who write daily or almost daily - are in the second category.

One consequence of using Blogger is that when a blog becomes successful and moves to it’s own domain, the importance of that blog as assessed by Google can fall substantially.

Case Study

For example, the Dave’s Part blog moved from http://davespartblog.blogspot.com/ to http://www.davidosler.com/ in late November 2006. Even now, more than 4 months and 150+ postings later, the new site still has a lower search profile on Google than the previous version.

The old site has 640 backlinks in Google. The new site has 475 backlinks.

The new site has a higher profile in blog search engines - but an estimated 70% of traffic comes via Google.

The problem is that if we are to break out of the political blogging ghetto, it will be done largely by traffic coming via Google, as this is where readers look.

More articles later this week

I’ll come back to this important subject more rigorously later this week when I have done more analysis and have more time - so do return or subscribe to the site RSS feed.

Any comments are welcome below.

Tags: British Politics, Politcal Blogging, Iain Dale, Spy, Top 100 blogs, Guide to Political Blogging, Google Rank