I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient, so I clicked through to try it.
On the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are:
#1 Michelle Malkin
#2 Captains Quarter Blog
#3 Eschaton
#4 Powerline
#5 Crooks and Liars
#6 Austin Bay
#7 Think Progress
#8 TPM Caf�
#9 The Anchoress
#10 Daily Kos
You can drill down and find the top liberal and conservative blogs. Two clicks later, I find that the top liberal bloggers are (the list goes to 20):
Liberal Politics
#1 Crooks and Liars
#2 The Left Coaster
#3 Eschaton
#4 Think Progress
#5 Daily Kos
#6 TPM Caf�
#7 Talking Points Memo
#8 Political Animal
#9 The Huffington Post
#10 America Blog
So please, Mr. Search Engine. Tell me something I don't know. I knew that Daily Kos and Atrios/Exchaton were very popular. I had no idea that Atrios was two places ahead of Kos, and... I don't care. It's not like baseball heading up to the playoffs, where there's going to be a single winner.
Where are the good centrist blogs, like The Moderate Voice and Ambivablog? They don't fit into the impoverished taxonomy, let alone sites like Booker Rising, a site focused on moderate-to-conservative African-Americans.
Here's the problem. The top 40 blog list is boring. It's stable. We know who they are. The job of a search engine is to tell the user something they don't already know.
Splitting up the top 100 into big themes is somewhat more interesting than the general-purpose Technorati 100. It's more meaningful to look at top political blogs, sci/tech blogs, entertainment blogs. But it's still stable, and doesn't convey much new information.
The top news stories is a bit more interesting, since that churns daily. That's an interesting zeitgeist check, and may be worth checking back.
The bulk of the site misses the glory of the web. With a vast amount of human knowledge there for the mining, please tell me something I didn't know already
Posted by alevin at August 7, 2005 11:48 AM | TrackBack