Twingly, the social blog search engine that prides itself in being completely spam-free, has launched BlogRank as a way to identify the 100 most important blogs in 12 different languages based on a proprietary ranking system. It’s very similar to what Technorati has been trying to achieve with their Authority ranking, i.e. creating a Google PageRank for blogs.
The biggest difference is that Twingly breaks down the most popular blogs by language, which they claim is worth much more for local blogs than competing with others at an international level. I tend to agree with that. It’s rather similar to what Wikio is doing (disclosure: TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon is on Wikio’s board).
To demonstrate the technology, Twingly is debuting its Top 100 today, taking another page from Technorati in that regard. We may be a little biased, but we like Twingly’s Top 100 better because we came out on top across all languages tracked (we also lead the English-language blog ranking). In all seriousness, the top 100 lists from Technorati and Twingly look very alike, although The Huffington Post (which is the most popular blog according to Technorati) isn’t even listed at Twingly’s. The startup says this has to do with the fact that they’re more focused on Europe right now, and that they’ve simply never bothered to ping the service anyway.
You can find out who leads the top 100 per tracked language (12 so far) in Twingly’s blog post announcing the new feature.
Sweden-based Twingly, not to be confused with Twing, doesn’t share much about the underlying technology and only says its ranking system focuses on ‘inlinks and likes among other things’. They also stress that it shows the blogosphere according to their data, and that it’s not necessarily 100% accurate. It’s a nice feature, but late in the game, and you’ve got to ask yourself how obsolete both Twingly’s and Technorati’s ranking would be if Google were actually the next to introduce the next ‘Google PageRank for blogs’.
One of the more interesting things about twingly is that it connects my Blog posts to “real” (old sk00l) media. My comments on articles are shown at major newspapers in a widget box right next to the article. For a good but small blog this can mean a huge traffic increase, which really helps me in growing.
This is awesome. I always thought that local blogs should be ranked separately.
Racing started with Technorati, seems Europeans triggered the saga
And NRKbeta (where I’m the editor) is number 1 in Norway. Whooooaaaa!!
Thanks, Twingly!
Congrats on having such a popular blog. I’m sure it’s lots of hard work. My tech blog for grandparents isn’t in the top 100 yet, but wait till next year!
The results are close to Technorati – but it is totally mysterious how HuffingtonPost could be #1 by a longshot on one and completely absent on the other.
Saying that they never pinged the service is a poor excuse for leaving out VITAL information – and even if they are focused on Europe, the blog should appear at the very least near the end.
This negligence or oversight only makes them appear less credible as a resource.
I agree, but on the other hand if they really focus on the biggest blogs in Europe, it’s quite normal that HuffPo isn’t in there. Virtually no one reads it over here.
That said, Twingly would be much more useful if it covered the world.
i don t understand why “viedemerde” and “”un blog des blogs” that are just publishing plateforms are put on this list in the french selection. does not make sense to me
And poof, they’re gone
Why wont TC release the post about googles edge cache server initiative?
Lets have the debate??
Release it? You mean from the cage? We’re not sure you can handle it
I agree, but on the other hand if they really focus on the biggest blogs in Europe, it’s quite normal that HuffPo isn’t in there. Virtually no one reads it over here.
That said, Twingly would be much more useful if it covered the world.
I think every thing is dependent on smart marketing and great content.
Sunita
That’s good idea from Twingly to categorize top 100 blogs according to languages
Stunning, really!
I’m always very skeptical when I read about a blog engine having made a brilliant fix-all ranking algorithm because the top researchers in the field are publishing papers about why it’s failing at the moment and what the challenges are that we still haven’t been able to address. We’re still not too hot on finding influential bloggers and posts.
For example (from my blog because some of you won’t have access to the full paper):
http://sciencef...loggers-in.html
http://sciencef...ing-issues.html
You will find many other recent papers on this topic too.
My impression of Twingly is that it does well on its “training set” but not so well on more ambiguous searches, Like “natural language processing” for example. Or “information retrieval”. Oh and “Ashtanga yoga” is shocking!
The top 100 seem to be all well known tech blogs mostly, and the French and German searches aren’t so hot either.
My feeling is that the issues the computer scientists are reporting on at conferences like SIGIR for example are still not resolved. And they haven’t been resolved by Twingly either.
good work done,its all depends upon the strategy of marketing,u need to know it,anyway if localblogs are given different ranking tat would be an encouragement to them.anyhow i will see tat next time my blog will be listed in top100,LOL
regards
aartha
http://truehotdeals.com
The list is completely broken – the only reason you’re writing about it is because they hacked a list together to put you at number one.
hear hear!
Great, Twingly is just one of the latest to launch a blog ranking system, apart from Technorati, there is RealRank by IZEA and Blogged which also ranks blogs. RealRank 100% discloses how its rank system works and it is what we prefer at http://www.youtechno.info
Amin
This is an excellent list. Except that it is not really the top 100 blogs. They are all tech blogs. Which is fine by us.
Thanks Erick!
Not all of them are tech blogs, even they’re quite many on our list…
We’re trying some new ways to get a better index in the US right now. Hopefully it’ll make the list better.
But the really cool thing with this is that it’s on 12 languages. BlogRank is actually based on language, not overall, which mean that the largest Swedish blog also has BlogRank 10. It’s more fun to be big in Sweden than be no 5123 international for a Swedish blog.
The number one Swedish blog, is not at all a tech blog. It’s a young woman blogging about her glamorous life with fashion, food and wild parties with friends in Stockholm. Not much technology…
great list!
Google’s Page Rank for blogs…those would be numbers I would trust. While I’m happy technorati made the top of Twingly’s list, I agree that the way they go about ranking seems a bit confusing. That being said, I’ve seen your ranking on Technorati, which aint too shaby, so I think we can trust Techcrunch is floating somewhere near the top regardless.
http://www.date...ia.wordpress.co
According the popular US ranking service URLFAN, techcrunch ranks #25 out of all websites, not just blogs :
http://www.urlf...op_100/100.html
A pretty impressive feat! Urlfan is a service that ranks sites according to their popularity in the blogosphere, and transparently shows all their data. It’s a little more clear than both technorati and twingly
I pinged my blog and it was fully indexed on Twingly in less than a day, pretty impressive.