by Brian over at Open Entrance. He uses a different measurement metric than we use here each month. However, the great thing from my perspective is that he made me aware of at least three Black owned & operated blogs that I simply hadn't heard about before.His Top Ten list is as follows:
- MediaTakeOut.com (not BBR-ranked)
- Sohh.com (not BBR-ranked)
- Bossip.com (BBR #1)
- Concreteloop.com (BBR #3)
- Young Black & Fabulous (BBR #7)
- Nah Right (BBR #4)
- Sandra Rose (BBR #10)
- Crunk & Disorderly (BBR #97)
- Mrs. Grapevine (BBR #42)
- Open Entrance (BBR #113)
Do you follow any of these blogs?
22 comments:
Those are mostly gossip blogs, they get a lot of hits but they stay focused on what they are. I've a few of them up my self.
That's a whole lot of popular gossip sites. I sometimes check out C&D but overall, those sites are serious brain-wasters.
They are all GOSSIP blogs.
Bossip called Dr. Angelou a hoe. I paid attention enough to contact Verizon to pull their ads and they were happy to oblige.
I have gone by a couple on the list, but not all. The only one that I visit regularly is Mrs. Grapevine, I find that her blog has more substance and accountability then just gossip and also she returns visits and comments. If someone is repeatedly coming by your sight a return visit or email every now and than is appreciated and just good common courtesy. And plus her drive for "Proud Black Voter" and her involvement in the "Global Day For Darfur" put her a few steps above just a "gossip blogger".
All - Yes, it does appear that the measurement process used by Open Entrance does lean towards gossip blogs. Hopefully, Brian will come visit with us here on the Electronic Village and provide his own thoughts on your comments.
I have to admit that I don't have time or inclination to regularly view gossip blogs...
I hate gossip and never read any of those blogs.
I don't have a problem with the existence of gossip blogs, but I just wish that our people would harness the power of internet in pursuits that free us.
I agree with Regina...the only exclusion to that list would be Mrs. G...who does not lower herself to being a gossip blogger; yes, she covers celebrity news but she approaches it with integrity and class...her involvement in the blogosphere goes so beyond "gossip blogger"...
SheCodes - Fortunately, we have a number of bloggers of color using their blog skills, time, talent and energy to uplift our people and our community...
Ms. Marvalus - I concur with your assessment of Mrs. Grapevine. She is good peeps...
Nah. I don't read gossip blogs, mag or even watch TMZ or ET. I'm a supernerd.
A lot of good conversations here and very similar to the comments that were left on my blog after the post.
Couple of quick notes here since I wrote a much more detailed post about my thoughts. My list was included the blogs I am aware of, but anyway you slice it, Gossip blogs rank better. Does that make them better? That will always be debatable no matter how you measure. The rankings by Electronic Village use Technorati rankings, which can be very easily manipulated in a number of ways. But he had to base his rankings on something which is consistent for everyone, just as I did.
Obviously the readers on this blog are of more intellectual stature than other blog readers, but topics about celebrity news trumps viewers of other topics in any medium you pick. Not saying it it right, just is.
Should people be interested in more substance topics? Probably , but then it becomes who do you follow; Fox News? NO. BET? No.
All I know is that Gossip blogs may not be the best in substance or truth, but there are a whole lot of people who tune in everyday to find out "What's Really Going On!"
Please read my full post on the topic at:
http://www.openentrance.com/2008/04/30/do-black-people-only-care-about-celebrity-gossip/
What does he mean by "Best"? Most hits? Hmmmm. (MTO btw is hot garbage)
Brother Hicks, I respectfully request to be left out of this month's BBR until I decide to return to Technorati. I appreciate it very much :-)
DN Lee - I feel ya' on being a supernerd. In my case, I'm just too old for that nonsense...
Positive Outlook - Thank you for sharing your insights. I am hopeful we can work together to find improved ways to document and rank Black Blogs. We'll talk more about it offline. For now, I'm interested in some of the ways that Technorati rankings can be manipulated. Care to share?
IW - I'll do my best to respect your wishes young sista. For what it's worth, I would encourage you to work out your differences with them as (for the most part) they provide a good service to bloggers in need of metrics...
Invisible Woman - Yes I called them best based on traffic.
Villager - The technorati rankings can easily be manipulated because they do not do a good job of eliminating spam or splogs. So you could easily create a number of wordpress.com or myspace blogs to increase your technorati rankings. Blogger would be more difficult because of all the advanced Captcha codes. More time consuming.
I am not recommending this or saying I would do it, but I'm just saying.
Brian
How is Mediatakeout the "best" blog, they completely make up stories, they are worse than Star magazine. Maybe they should just replace the word best with popular.
Brian - Thanks for the explanation. I haven't observed those tactics being done during the time I've been tracking Black blogs. And if they were done ... the results would fall off after 6 months as any link that is older than 180 days rolls off your Authority ranking. Give some thought to how we can combine the two sources of information (complete.com and technorati.com) into a cumulative ranking. Of course, to do so you would need to accept that blogspot.com and wordpress.com are equally worthy of being ranked (smile)...
Naima - Your point is well taken. As a matter of fact, I don't consider MTO to be a blog so they are not even listed on the BBR I issue each month...
Ha.. I believe that wordpress and blogspot are worthy of being ranked, there is no good way that I know of to track traffic statistics. All of the sites that track traffic stats, compete.com, quantcast.com, alexa.com, all group them under the main domain. So I would have to give every blogspot blog credit for 35 million unique visitors per month, but I am pretty sure that is not the case. I will have to figure out a way of to include them in the rankings. Or everyone could just get a unique domain name that may be of good value to them down the road, but since I doubt the later will happen, we can figure it out.
Brian
now to completely contradict myself -- did you here that actor Orlando Brown has been found?
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20194640,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines
I'll be honest, y'all. I'm bewildered by the preoccupation some folk have with heuristics like Technorati rankings, etc.
Are our self esteems so low that we need validation? Most of us were the bomb long before technorati picked us up. What is this, high school? LOL
Popularity in and of itself is meaningless, unless you are using it to make some kind of difference for yourself or others.
My rating will go to zero in a few months because I am moving my blog to another URL in late summer/early fall. I suspect that some folk out there are letting technorati limit their choices or behaving out of character in order to raise their numbers.
I like your blog rankings because it's how I find some really good blogs -- and frankly some of the best ones are at the bottom of the list.
Personally Wayne and Brian of Open Entrance, I like the thought of knowing how you rank amongst the more popular websites but all that does not count if you don't have a group of loyal, returning, and responsive readers. What good is your blog is you can't learn anything from it? Will MTO or Bossip make me a better person because I now know that Jay-Z and Beyonce got married? Yea I might generate a few conversations with it, but it's not going to benefit me in any other way than that.
Maybe we should just go back to the voting days and vote on the best blogs - like Black Blog Awards. Perhaps, EV should look into something like this and have our own based off of the blogs EV has on the list. I think the most important voice is the readers - so why not let them vote on who they think is the best blogs - not a robot?
i really don't hit up the gossip blogs, unless there is something that i really want to know about.
if so, then i click on concreteloop.
i used to check out sandrarose last year when i first started blogging. got bored.
Brian - I will try to find some time over the coming weeks to get all of my information into an excel spreadsheet. That probably gives us the best flexibility...
DN - Yeah, I saw that Orlando came back home after being lost for a day...
SheCodes - My thought is that we need to develop metrics that allow us to measure the success of our blogs. Technorati is one metric. There may be others. Obviously a blogger should not focus on the metric at the exclusion of quality posts and so forth. Just like we shouldn't teach our kids to take a test without providing them confidence and knowledge to learn. Anyhow, your point is well taken...
Deidre - I'm comfortable with the idea of voting that takes place on the various blog awards...
Don - Thanx for the tip on Concrete Loop...
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