The Wardman Wire

I have had an exclusive look at the new rankings for political blogs by Wikio which are coming out tomorrow, and there are some major changes.

These rankings are based on links from blog articles on monitored blogs, and that blogroll links are ignored.

There have been some changes to the algorithm to take links from blogs over the previous 9 months into account (rather than 4), and the value attached to a link gradually reduces (on a straight line basis) as it gets older. The changes this month are larger than are likely in the future.

I’m writing this offline (connection problems), so I cannot comment in quite as much detail as I would like.

These are the key changes in the UK Top Political Blog rankings (full list is below):

• Liberal Conspiracy is now number 3 (which puts it at no 11 in the rankings for “All UK Blogs”).
• LibDem Voice is now ahead of Labour Home.
• Nick Robinson’s BBC Politics Blog has dropped (just) out of the Top 20 behind some Independents.
• Dizzy Thinks is at number 18, having appeared from nowhere in the politics rankings last time.
• The Wardman Wire is now number 14 (18 under the previous system). Chicken Yoghurt has also advanced.
• If Normblog were in the “Politics” not the “Other” category it would be in the Top 5 in this list.

By my reckoning almost half of these top 20 are group blogs or blogs with multiple regular contributors (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15 in the list below).

With Wikio the real prize is to be in the Top 10, then a link is displayed in the sidebar of some pages on the Wikio site, which helps visibility and traffic.

Top 20 Wikio Political Blogs

Note: The subscribe links are to Wikio’s summary feeds - you need to visit the blog itself to subscribe directly.

1	Iain Dale’s Diary		=
2	Guy Fawkes’ blog		=
3	Liberal Conspiracy		+
4	The Devil’s Kitchen		=
5	ConservativeHome’s ToryDiary		-
6	politicalbetting.com		-
7	EU Referendum		+
8	Liberal Democrat Voice		+
9	Samizdata.net		-
10	Labourhome		-
11	Mr Eugenides		+
12	Tim Worstall		-
13	Chicken Yoghurt		+
14	The Wardman Wire		+
15	Pickled Politics		-
16	Telegraph Blogs - Daniel Hannan		-
17	John Redwood’s Diary		+
18	Dizzy Thinks		+
19	Bloggerheads		+
20	Benedict Brogan’s political blog		-

Other Notes

Among Welsh Blogs, Ordovicius and Miss Wagstaff Presents are now at (from memory) positions 26 and 40 respectively.

Generally, it’s looking far more balanced politically than before, which I think is a good thing. The increasing importance of group blogs, of which Liberal Conspiracy is the extreme example with almost three dozen writers, should increase the diversity of voices among the top 20 blogs on this list.

There seems to be a general move ahead for regularly published independent blogs versus mainstream media blogs; this could be due to the reassessment of linking - or conceivably it could be due to Wikio focussing on blogs not attached to larger websites.

Gaming this algorithm is probably possible at the margins in my opinion, but only by manipulating the links in dozens or hundreds of blog articles - which will be far more difficult than gaming Technorati (which is not very difficult if you are in a position which only requires around 50-100 links).

Wrapping Up

I’ll comment on the overall rankings, where I have also had site of the Top 20, later on this evening.

It will be interesting to see how the new conservative “Blue Blog ” gets on.