What makes this a "superstar" blog?

July 28, 2008 4:52 PM

Why is the blog Tricia's Musings ranked so highly?

From time to time I like to check out the blog rankings at Truth Laid Bear, and a blog called Tricia's Musings is always in the top 10. I've looked at her blog several times and I don't understand why it's ranked so highly.

Don't get me wrong- it's a lovely blog, nicely designed, well-written, and interesting. But so are countless other blogs. What has propelled this particular personal diary blog into the ranks of behemoth blogs like Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Boing Boing, etc.?

posted by bluekrauss to computers & internet (8 comments total)

This is old but may be relevant: Gaming the Blog Ecosystem.
posted by Knappster at 5:06 PM on July 28, 2008

It's only got a page rating of 3, so I'm not sure why it is ranking high on truth laid bear, but I'm thinking posting regularity has something to do with the rankings. She has three posts in one day alone and that keeps her ranking high?
posted by misha at 5:28 PM on July 28, 2008

On closer inspection, her blog seems to have been ranked high based on inbound links, rather than traffic. She might just be very good at generating links from many other blogs—though not good enough to increase her Google pagerank.
posted by Knappster at 6:09 PM on July 28, 2008

Am I wrong to say that the blogosopher is disappointedly enough like high school? I could never figure out why Becky the cheerleader/class VP was so popular... even after half the football team got crabs.

My real point is - does anyone actually take Truth Laid Bear seriously?
posted by meta x zen at 6:30 PM on July 28, 2008

It's alexa ranking is 72,161, it's Technorati rank is 12,306

So the answer is, it's not, and "the truth laid bear" sucks and is incorrect. I've never even heard of that site. It itself has an alexa rank of 110,229.
posted by delmoi at 7:08 PM on July 28, 2008

It's an average blog, dude, delmoi is right, 72K alexa ranking is not that awesome
posted by matteo at 7:46 PM on July 28, 2008

TTLB was a minor neo-con "war blog" some years ago, started this blogging ecosystem thing, then quit and went inactive so it was taken over by another site -- which itself quit in 2003. The ecosystem rankings are probably accurate by the system he (N.Z. Bear, who claims to be a professional writer/editor) uses but it's a very narrow snapshot of the internet that emanates outward, essentially, from Instapundit, and thereby misses galaxies and universes full of blogs devoted to non-political topics. The ones that it does find are outliers that have some overlap with the political blogs. I don't think his ranking system, which was at least in the beginning manually done in Excel, is remotely as robust as that of Technorati and so on.

(I was once an Insignificant Microbe.)
posted by dhartung at 10:43 PM on July 28, 2008

I work in the science/politics blogosphere, and I've never heard of Truth Laid Bear. Having looked at it, I see nothing to indicate that its data is of any value whatsoever. I see a lot of old data.
posted by crickets at 8:02 AM on July 29, 2008