This blog is one of the Top 20 education blogs, according to PostRank, which ranks blogs based on “engagement,” a formula that purports to measure how thoroughly readers interact with a blog’s content: bookmarking, commenting, sharing or writing about a particular blog’s content. It’s a nice validation of the main purpose of this forum, which is to create and sustain a dialogue among smart people with a passion for education.
Tech whiz Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant is confused by the rankings and raises many valid points. Many blogs that I follow faithfully are not ranked at all, which suggests that PostRank is not casting a wide enough net. But regardless, this is a good opportunity to thank everyone who takes the time to stop by, read, post, contribute, opine and argue.
Engagement, indeed!
Congrats on the Top 20 ranking! Do you know the number of average visitors you get each day/week/month? I’ll mention the blog again to my yahoogroup, ckhomeschoolers, and see if we can’t help you break into the Top 10!
Janice Kielb
List Moderator/Owner
ckhomeschoolers yahoogroup
I’m not sure about this one. My old blog, which I left idle months ago to start at Change.org, is in the top 40, and the Students 2.0 blog I co-launched with students a year ago (and which has beeen belly-up and inactive for months) is in the top 50.
It _is_ good to see a ranking based on engagement factors, instead of mere Technorati rankings.
Honestly, with tweets and facebooks and stumbles and the whole shebang, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to being able to map the new world….
Fair enough. I confess I have a hard time understanding just why blog traffic stats should be so hard to gather since we leave a bright, shiny trail of digital breadcrumbs wherever we go. Still, Technorati finds links WordPress doesn’t and vice versa, and the almighty Google misses more than it hits. I can understand the differences in interpreting the data, but why it’s so hard to gather it.
It was a major headache in my PR days trying to accurately and adequately compare the audiences and reach of various blogs. We basically settled on using multiple measures with a good dose of our own qualitative assessment (based on our own blog reading) to get a sense of what blog traffic really was. It’s imprecise, of course, but any measure that says you’re doing a good job is a nice thing.